. 777.
Chapters
from
Some Unwritten Memoirs
BY
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
AUTHOR OF
RECORDS OF TENNYSON, RUSKIN, BROWNING " ETC.
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1895
Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS
All rights reserved.
TO
GEORGE AND ELIZABETH MURRAY SMITH
These chapters out of the past (and how many
more that are not written here) are
affectionately 2>eDtcateD
BY THE WRITER
THE END HOUSE, WIMBLEDON
September 13, 1894
Le bonheur ma pr<*te plus d'tm lien fragile
Mais c'est adversite qui ma fait un ami
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MY POET I
II. MY MUSICIAN 15
III. MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 29
IV. MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 43
v. MY WITCHES' CALDRON 55
VI. IN KENSINGTON 83
VII. TO WEIMAR AND BACK IOI
viii. VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 119
IX. IN VILLEGGIATURA 141
X. TOUT CHEMIN 165
XI. MRS. KEMBLE 185
MY POET
I
Mv father lived in good company, so that even
as children we must have seen a good many poets
and remarkable people, though we were not always
conscious of our privileges. Things certainly strike
children oddly, partially, and for such unexpected
reasons. They are so busy in early life with all that
is going on on every side, that one person or an-
other person, the visitor in the drawing-room, the
tortoise-shell cat on the garden wall, the cook's little
boy who has come in to partake of cold pudding,
all seem very nearly as important one as the other.
Perhaps I should not have been so much impressed
by my first conscious sight of a poet, if I had then
realized all the notabilities who came to our house
from time to time. My special poet was a French-
man. I first heard his name in London, at a class
which I attended in company with a good many
other little girls my contemporaries, which class,
indeed, still continues, and succeeding generations
receive the decorations, the flr/sidences and the sous
prc'sidcnccs, I fear I personally never attained to.
My poet was a hair-dresser by profession, and a
4 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
barber as well. His name was Jasmin (Jaquou
Jansemin in the langue d'Oc}. He was born in
1798 at Agen, in the south of France ; " born," he
writes, " of a humpback father and a halting moth-
er in the corner of an old street, in a crowded
dwelling, peopled by many rats, on Holy Thursday,
at the hour when pancakes are tossed." The hump-
back father was also a poet in his way, and com-
posed songs for the itinerant players of the neigh-
borhood. So soon as Jasmin could walk he used to
accompany his father to the booths, but what he
liked better still was gathering fagots in the little
islands of the Garonne. " Bareheaded, barefoot-
ed," he writes, " we rowed across the stream. I
was not alone: there were twenty of us there
were thirty of us. We started at the stroke of the
mid-day hour, singing in choir." In the evening
the children returned as they had left " thirty
voices chaunting the same cadence, and thirty fag-
ots dancing on thirty heads." They were so poor
that Jacques felt it bitterly because his parents
could not afford to send him to school. One day
he was playing in the market-place when he saw
his grandfather carried by to the hospital. It was
there the Jasmins were in the habit of dying. But
a cousin taught him to read ; he became appren-
ticed to a barber ; he rose to be a hair-dresser, and
prospered in his vocation, so that he was able to
MY POET 5
save his father from the usual fate of the Jasmins.
The hair -dresser christened his first poems Les Pa-
pillotcs, in honor of his profession ; which songs,
says he, brought a silver streamlet through his
shop, and upon this silver streamlet he floated to
better fortunes than were usual to the Jasmin
family. One day, in a fit of poetic ardor, he broke
the terrible arm-chair in which they had all been in
the habit of being carried to the hospital. Jasmin,
after he became celebrated, would never abandon
his home or his little shop, but from time to time
he went for a journey ; sometimes he would come
to Paris, where he was kindly recognized by other
authors more fortunate in their worldly circum-
stances, and he would be made to repeat his own
songs by the great ladies who took him up. Chief
among them was Lady Elgin, who lived in Paris
then, and who was a good friend to all literary as-
pirants. Longfellow was also among Jasmin's ad-
mirers, and translated some of his works. Much of
all this I have since read in the Biographic A r a-
tionalc. As children at our French classes we had
only learned some of his lines by heart. I used to
break down in utter confusion when my turn came
to recite, but at the same time I believe I took in
a great deal more than I had any idea of, as I sat
there incompetent, wool-gathering. In that long.
bare room, only ornamented by a few large maps and
6 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
with a flowing border of governesses, there came
to one many of those impressions which are not
dates or facts, and which don't, alas ! count for good
marks, but which nevertheless are very useful and
agreeable possessions in after- days. We used to
have delightful French lessons in literature and
poetry, and I still remember the dazzling visions
of troubadours evoked by our teacher troubadours
amid the golden landscapes of the south of France,
as described in the Mysteries of Udolpho ; the po-
ems themselves as he quoted them almost seemed
to have wings and to come flying out of the
well-thumbed Rccueil ! We had lessons in morality
and in experience as well as in literature. I can
still hear M. Roche in his melodious voice quoting
" de tout laurier un poison est 1'essence," and
praising the philosophical aptness of the illustra-
tion, which seemed to me so splendid that I was
quite overpowered by it as I went home with my
governess along South Audley Street. There was
another heart-rending poem about an angel stand-
ing by a cradle and contemplating its own image
in the face of an infant, " reflected as in a stream."
The angel finally carries away the poor baby, and
the mother kneels weeping by the empty cradle.
It was a sort of Christmas-card of a poem well suit-
ed to the sentimental experience of a little girl of
twelve or thirteen years old, and I then and there
MY POET 7
determined that Reboul was my favorite author,
after all. But there were many others besides Re-
boul. Poor Andre Chenier we were all in love with,
and Jasmin aforesaid held his own among the
worthy recipients of that golden flower of poesy
which played such an important part in our early
education, and which was (so we learned) yearly be-
stowed by the inhabitants of Toulouse upon the
most successful competitors in the art. I used to
picture the flower itself as a radiant, quivering ob-
ject covered with delicate, glittering workmanship.
Perhaps nowadays I realize that golden flowers of
poesy are also bestowed in the south of England
in Waterloo Place, or Bedford Street, Covent Gar-
den, shall we say? round golden tokens which
are not without their own special graces.
But to return to my memoirs. Our life was di-
vided between London and Paris, where our grand-
parents d\velt, and where we spent a part of every
year, and all my recent studies and experiences
rushed into my mind one day soon after our re-
turn to France, when my grandmother told me
that she had been asked to a party at Lady Elgin's
to meet a poet, that his name was Jasmin, and that
she was going to take me with her! My heart
leaped with excitement ; Jasmin the South gold-
en flowers prdsidences a grown-up party the
portals of life seemed to fly open with those of our
porte-cochere as the carriage, containing my grand-
mother and me in our Sunday best, drove off into
the dark streets. We were escorted down-stairs by
the cook, with an extra lantern, I remember, and
my grandfather in his little black silk toque waved
farewell over the staircase. We started expectant,
rolling over the rattling stones ; we crossed the
bridge and saw the dark river below us reflecting
the lights I remember no stars, but a damp and
drizzly darkness overhead, which, for some reason,
added to my excitement. We reached the ancient
faubourg before very long, where the oil-lamps
swung by chains across the streets; we turned into
the Rue de Varennes, where Lady Elgin lived, and
the coachman rapped at the great closed gates of
the house, which opened with a grinding sound,
and we walked across the court-yard. The apart-
ment was on the ground-floor of a fine, melancholy
old house.
I followed my grandmother in her brown velvet
gown and her diamond brooch into the reception-
room. I remember being surprised to find the gay
world so dark on the whole, and talking in such a
confused and subdued murmur. I had expected
chandeliers, bursts of laughter, people in masks
and dominoes. I had taken my ideas from bon-
bon-boxes and crackers. But it was evidently all
right my grandmother looked greatly pleased and
MY POET g
animated. I saw her speaking to one person and
to another in her dignified way; her manners were
true grandmother's manners kind, but distant and
serious. We considered our grandmother a very
important personage, and I remember feeling not
a little proud of her beauty and dignity as we
moved along. She was not one of your " remains ;"
she was a very noble-looking old lady, holding her
head high, and her diamond cap-pin flashed as she
moved across the room.
My grandmother looked pleased and animated, as
I have said, and when her friends came up to speak
to her she introduced me to some of them. Almost
the very first person she greeted, but to whom she
did not introduce me, was a handsome, rather ro-
mantic, fashionable - looking gentleman, with a^
quantity of dark hair, and a glass in one eye, lean-
ing against the wall by the door as we entered.
She said a few words as we passed. I heard some-
thing about " Lady Charlotte," and then we walked
on, and presently we came upon another girl,
younger than myself and very distinguished look-
ing, in a plaid frock, with beautiful shining braids
of thick hair, who seemed quite at home and used
to the house ; she was with her mother, a regal-
looking little woman, with a fine profile and a gold
crown ; I can still see her in a long green velvet
robe slowly crossing the room ; she was a well-
IO CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
known person Mrs. Chapman, the celebrated Abo-
litionist. The little girl was her youngest daugh-
ter. While Mrs. Chapman and my grandmother
were talking to one another, little Anne Chapman,
who seemed to know most of the people, began
telling me who they all were. A great many pages
out of M. Roche's Rccueil were present. There
were all sorts of notable folks murmuring to one
another in the big rooms. " Who was the gentle-
man in the doorway?" ''Oh, he is Mr. Locker,"
said little Anne ; " he is married to Lady Charlotte
Lady Elgin's daughter; didn't I know? they
had only come over from England the day before."
"And which is the poet?" said I, eagerly. " There
he is, in the middle of the room," said the little
girl. " Oh, where?" said I. " Oh, not that T For
suddenly, just under the swinging chandelier, I see
a head, like the figure-head of a ship a jolly, red,
shiny, weather-beaten face, with large, round, prom-
inent features, ornamented with little pomatumy
wisps of hair, and a massive torso clothed in a mag-
nificent frilled shirt over a pink lining. ..." That
the poet? not that," I falter, gazing at Punchinello,
high-shouldered, good-humored ! " Yes, of course
it is that," said the little girl, laughing at my dis-
may ; and the crowd seems to form a circle, in the
centre of which stands this droll being, who now
begins to recite in a monotonous voice.
MY POET II
I can understand French well enough, but not
one single word of what he is saying. It sounds
perfectly unintelligible, something like chi, chou,
cha, atchioii, atchiou, atchion ! And so it goes on,
and on, and on. The shirt frill beats time, the
monotonous voice rises and falls. It leaves off at
last, the poet wipes the perspiration from his brow ;
there is a moment's silence, then a murmur of ad-
miration from the crowd which closes round him.
I see the Punchinello being led up to somebody
to be thanked and congratulated ; my heart goes
down, down ; more murmurs, more exclamations.
The little girl is gone, I am all alone with my dis-
appointment, and then my grandmother calls me
to her side and says it is time to come away. As
we move towards the door again, we once more
pass Mr. Locker, and he nods kindly, and tells me
he knows my father. " Well, and what do you
think of Jasmin?" he asks; but I can't answer him,
my illusions are dashed. As we drive off through
the streets the rain is still falling, the oil-lamps are
swinging; we cross the bridge once more, but how
dull, how dark, how sad it all seems ! My grand-
mother, sitting upright in the dark carriage, says
she has spent a very pleasant evening, and that she
is delighted with Jasmin's simplicity and original-
ity. I who had longed to see a poet ! who had
pictured something so different! I swallowed down
12 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
as best I could that gulp of salt-water which is so
apt to choke us when we first take our plunge into 1 *
the experience of life. " He didn't look much
like a poet, and I couldn't understand what he
said," I faltered.
" Of course you could not understand the patois,
but have you not enjoyed your evening?" said my
grandmother, disappointed. I had the grace to
try to speak cheerfully. " I liked the little girl
very much, and and and I liked talking to Mr.
Locker, but then he isnt a poet," said I.
I can't help laughing even now as I conjure up
the absurd little dream of the past and the bitterness
of that childish disappointment. How little do we
mortals recognize our good-fortune that comes to
us now and again in a certain humorous disguise.
Why, I had been in a world of poets ! A poet had
greeted me, a poet had sung to me, I had been
hustled by poets ; there in the crowd (for all I
know to the contrary) were Lamartine and Cha-
teaubriand and Girardin and Merimee so, at least,
some one who was present on this occasion re-
minds me. And as for Frederick Locker, does not
his caged music like that of the bird of Wood
Street echo along the arid pavements with sweet-
est and most welcome note to charm the passers-
by as the echoes of " London Lyrics " fall upon the
listening ear? And the red face was also that of a
MY POET 13
true poet, born to sing his sweet, unpretending song
from a true heart, and to bring music into humble
places. " A poet of the people, writing in his dia-
lect, celebrating public occasions and solemnities,"
says Sainte-Beuve, " which somehow remind one of
the Middle Ages; belonging" (so he continues)
"to the school of Horace and to the school of
Theocritus and to that of Gray, and to that of all
those charming studious inspirations which aim at
perfection in all their work."
MY MUSICIAN
II
ONE'S early life is certainly a great deal more
amusing to look back to than it used to be when
it was going on. For one thing it isn't nearly so
long now as it was then, and remembered events
come cheerfully scurrying up one after another,
while the intervening periods are no longer the
portentous cycles they once were. And another
thing to consider is that the people walking in and
out of the by-gone mansions of life were not, to
our newly-opened eyes, the interesting personages
many of them have since become ; then they were
men walking as trees before us, without names or
histories; noiv some of the very names mean for us
the history of our time. Very young people's eyes
are certainly of more importance to them than their
ears, and they all see the persons they are destined
to spend their lives with long before the figures
begin to talk and to explain themselves.
My grandmother had a little society of her own
at Paris, in the midst of which she seemed to reign
from dignity and kindness of heart ; her friends, it
must be confessed, have not as yet become historic,
1 8 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
but she herself was well worthy of a record. Grand-
mothers in books and memoirs are mostly alike
stately, old-fashioned, kindly, and critical. Mine
was no exception to the general rule. She had
been one of the most beautiful women of her time ;
she was very tall, with a queenly head and carriage ;
she always moved in a dignified w r ay. She had an
odd taste in dress, I remember, and used to walk
out in a red merino cloak trimmed with ermine,
which gave her the air of a retired empress wearing
out her robes. She was a woman of strong feeling,
somewhat imperious, with a passionate love for lit-
tle children, and with extraordinary sympathy and
enthusiasm for any one in trouble or in disgrace.
How benevolently she used to look round the room
at her many proteges, with her beautiful gray eyes !
Her friends as a rule were shorter than she was and
brisker, less serious and emotional. They adopted
her views upon politics, religion, and homoeopathy,
or at all events did not venture to contradict them.
But they certainly could not reach her heights, and
her almost romantic passion of feeling.
A great many of my earliest recollections seem
to consist of old ladies armies of old ladies, so
they appear to me, as I look back through the
larger end of my glasses to the time when my sister
and I were two little girls living at Paris. I re-
member once that after a long stay in England with
MY MUSICIAN 19
our father, the old ladies seemed changed some-
how to our more experienced eyes. They were
the same, but with more variety ; not all alike as
they had seemed before, not all the same age ; some
were younger, some were older than we had re-
membered them one was actually married ! Our
grandmother looked older to us this time when
we came back to Paris ; we were used to seeing our
father's gray hair, but that hers should turn white
too seemed almost unnatural. The very first day
we walked out with her after our return, we met
the bride of whose marriage we had heard while
we were away. She was a little dumpy, good-
natured woman of about forty-five, I suppose shall
I ever forget the thrill with which we watched her
approach, hanging with careless grace upon her
husband's arm ? She wore light, tight kid gloves
upon her little fat hands, and a bonnet like a bride's
cake, i Marriage had not made her proud as it does
some people ; she recognized us at once and intro-
duced us to the gentleman. " Very 'appy to make
your acquaintance, miss," said he. " Mrs. C. 'ave
often mentioned you at our place."
Children begin by being Philistines. As we parted
I said to my grandmother that I had always known
people dropped their h's, but that I didn't know
one ever married them. My grandmother seemed
trying not to laugh, but she answered gravely that
2O CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
Mr. and Mrs. C. looked very happy, h's or no h's.
And so they did, walking off along those illumi-
nated Elysian fields gay with the echoes of Paris in
May, while the children capered to itinerant music,
and flags were flying and penny trumpets ringing,
and strollers and spectators were lining the way,
and the long interminable procession of carriages
in the centre of the road went rolling steadily
towards the Bois de Boulogne. As we walked
homewards evening after evening the sun used to
set splendidly in the very centre of the great trium-
phal arch at the far end of the avenue, and flood
everything in a glorious tide of light. What indeed
did an aspirate more or less matter at such a mo-
ment !
I don't think we ever came home from one of
our walks that we did not find our grandfather sit-
ting watching for our grandmother's return. We
used to ask him if he didn't find it very dull doing
nothing in the twilight, but he used to tell us it
was his thinking-time. My sister and I thought
thinking dreadfully dull, and only longed for can-
dles and Chambers 's Miscellany. A good deal of
thinking went on in our peaceful home ; we should
have liked more doing. One day was just like an-
other ; my grandmother and my grandfather sat
on either side of the hearth in their two accus-
tomed places ; there was a French cook in a white
MY MUSICIAN 21
cap who brought in the trays and the lamp at the
appointed hour; there was Chambers on the book-
shelf, Pickwick, and one or two of my father's
books, and The Listener, by Caroline Fry, which
used to be my last desperate resource when I had
just finished all the others. We lived in a sunny
little flat on a fourth floor, with windows east and
west and a wide horizon from each, and the sound
of the cries from the street below, and the con-
fusing roll of the wheels when the windows were
open in summer. In winter time we dined at
five by lamp-light at the round table in my grand-
father's study. After dinner we used to go into
the pretty blue drawing-room where the peat fire
would be burning brightly in the open grate, and
the evening paper would come in with the tea. I
can see it all still, hear it, smell the peat, and taste
the odd herbaceous tea and the French bread
and butter. On the band of the Constitutional
newspaper was printed " M. le Major Michel Esch-
mid." It was not my grandfather's name or any-
thing like it, but he would gravely say that when
English people lived in France they must expect
to have their names gallicised, and his paper cer-
tainly found him out evening after evening. While
my grandmother with much emphasis read the
news (she was a fervent republican, and so was my
grandfather), my sister and I would sit unconscious
22 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
of politics and happy over our story-books until
the fatal, inevitable moment when a ring was heard
at the bell and evening callers were announced.
Then we reluctantly shut up our books, for we
were told to get our needle-work when the com-
pany came in, and we had to find chairs and hand
teacups, and answer inquiries, and presently go to
bed.
The ladies Avould come in in their bonnets, with
their news and their comments upon the' public
events, which, by the way, seemed to go off like
fireworks in those days expressly for our edifica-
tion. Ours was a talkative, economical, and active
little society Cranford en Voyage is the impres-
sion which remains to me of those early surround-
ings. If the ladies were one and all cordially at-
tached to my grandmother, to my grandfather
they were still more devoted. A Major is a Ma-
jor. He used to sign their pension papers, admin-
ister globules for their colds, give point and sup-
port to their political opinions. I can see him still
sitting in his arm-chair by the fire with a little semi-
circle round about the hearth. Ours was anything
but a meek and disappointed community. \Ve
may have had our reverses and very important
reverses they all seem to have been but we had
all had spirit enough to leave our native shores and
settle in Paris, not without a certain implied disap-
MY MUSICIAN 23
proval of the other people who went on living in
England regardless of expense. My father did not
escape this criticism. Why, they used to say, did
he remain in that nasty smoky climate, so bad for
health and spirits? Why didn't he settle in Paris
and write works upon the French ? Why didn't I
write and coax him to come, and tell him that it
was our grandmother's wish that he should do so ;
that the speaker, Mademoiselle Trotkins (or who-
ever it might be), had told me to write? I remem-
ber going through an early martyrdom at these
friendly hands, and bitterly and silently resent-
ing their indignation with any one who could pre-
fer that black and sooty place London to Paris.
At the same time they allowed that the layers were
becoming more exorbitant every day, and as for
the fruiticre at the corner, she was charging no
less than forty sous for her Isyngny. We always
talked in a sort of sandwich of French and Eng-
lish. Oddly enough, though we talked French,
and some of us even looked French, we knew no
French people. From time to time at other houses
I used to hear of real foreigners, but I don't remem-
ber seeing any at ours, except a past 'cur who some-
times came, and a certain Viscomte de B. (I had
nearly written Bragelonne), whose mother, I be-
lieve, was also English. Jcuncs fillcs, jcuncs flcurs,
he used to say, bowing to the young ladies. This
24 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
was our one only approach to an introduction to
French society. But all the same one cannot live
abroad without imbibing something of the coun-
try, of the air and the earth and the waters among
which one is living. Breath and food and raiment
are a part of one's life after all, and a very consid-
erable part; and all the wonderful tide of foreign
sunshine and the cheerful crowds and happy voices
outside, and the very click of pots and pans in the
little kitchen at the back seemed to have a character
of their own. And so, though we knew nothing of
the French, we got to know France and to feel at
home there beneath its blue sky, and I think to
this day a holiday abroad is ten times more a holi-
day than a holiday at home. From mere habit,
one seems to be sixteen again, and one's spirits
rise and one's exigencies abate. Besides the dwell-
ers in the appartcmcnts and the regular customers
of the extortionate fruitiere, there used to be pass-
ing friends and acquaintances who visited us on
their way to other resorts to Italy, to the Ger-
man baths. Some stopped in Paris for a week or
two at a time, others for a few days' only. I re-
member three Scotch ladies, for whom my grand-
mother had a great regard, who were not part of our
community, but who used to pass through Paris, and
always made a certain stay. ... I was very much
afraid of them, though interested at the same time
MY MUSICIAN 25
as girls arc in unknown quantities. They were
well connected and had estates and grand rela-
tions in the distance, though they seemed to live
as simply as we did. One winter it was announced
that they had taken an apartment for a few wee.ks,
and next morning I was sent with a note to one of
them by my grandmother. They were tall, thin
ladies, two were widows, one was a spinster ; of the
three the unmarried one frightened me most. On
this occasion, after reading the note, one of the
widow ladies said to the spinster, Miss X., who
had her bonnet on, " Why, you were just going to
call on the child's grandmother, were you not?
Why don't you take her back with you in the car-
riage?" "I must first go and see how he is this
morning," said Miss X., somewhat anxiously, " and
then I will take her home, of course. Are the things
packed ?" A servant came in carrying a large bas-
ket with a variety of bottles and viands and nap-
kins. I had not presence of mind to run away as
I longed to do, and somehow in a few minutes I
found myself sitting in a little open carriage with
the Scotch lady, and the basket on the opposite
seat. I thought her, if possible, more terrible than
ever she seemed grave, preoccupied. She had a
long nose, a thick brown complexion, grayish sandy
hair, and was dressed in scanty cloth skirts gray
and sandy too. She spoke to me, I believe, but
26 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
my heart was in my mouth ; I hardly dared even
listen to what she said. We drove along the
Champs Elysees towards the Arc and then turned
into a side street, and presently came to a house at
the door of which the carnage stopped. The lady
got out, carefully carrying her heavy basket, and
told me to follow, and we began to climb the shiny
stairs one, two flights I think then we rang at a
bell and the door was almost instantly opened. It
was opened by a slight, delicate-looking man with
long hair, bright eyes, and a thin, hooked nose.
When Miss X. saw him she hastily put down her
basket upon the floor, caught both his hands in
hers, began to shake them gently, and to scold him
in an affectionate reproving way for having come
to the door. He laughed, said he had guessed
who it was, and motioned to her to enter, and I
followed at her sign with the basket followed into
a narrow little room, with no furniture in it what-
ever but an upright piano against the wall and a
few straw chairs standing on the wooden shiny
floor. He made us sit down with some courtesy,
and in reply to her questions said he was pretty
well. Had he slept? He shook his head. Had
he eaten ? He shrugged his shoulders and then
he pointed to the piano. He had been compos-
ing something I remember that he spoke in an
abrupt, light sort of way would Miss X. like to
MY MUSICIAN 27
hear it? "She would like to hear it," she an-
swered, " of course, she would dearly like to hear
it ; but it would tire him to play ; it could not be
good for him." He smiled again, shook back his
long hair, and sat down immediately ; and then
the music began and the room was filled with con-
tinuous sound, he looking over his shoulder now
and then to see if we were liking it. The lady sat
absorbed and listening, and as I looked at her I
saw tears in her eyes great clear tears rolling
down her cheeks while the music poured on and
on. I can't, alas, recall that music ! I would give
anything to remember it now; but the truth is, I
was so interested in the people that I scarcely
listened. When he stopped at last and looked
round, the lady started up. " You mustn't play
any more," she said ; " no more, no more, it's too
beautiful " and she praised him and thanked him
in a tender, motherly, pitying sort of way, and then
hurriedly said we must go ; but as we took leave
she added, almost in a whisper with a humble
apologizing look " I have brought you some of
that jelly, and my sister sent some of the wine you
fancied the other day ; pray, pray try to take a
little." He again shook his head at her, seeming
more vexed than grateful. " It is very wrong ;
you shouldn't bring me these things," he said in
French. " I won't play to you if you do " but she
28 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
put him back softly, and hurriedly closed the door
upon him and the offending basket, and hastened
away. As we were coming down-stairs she wiped
her eyes again. By this time I had got to under-
stand the plain, tall, grim, warm-hearted woman;
all my silly terrors were gone. She looked hard at
me as we drove away. " Never forget that you
have heard Chopin play," she said with emotion,
" for soon no one will ever hear him play any more."
Sometimes reading the memoirs of the great
musician, the sad story of his early death, of his
passionate fidelity, and cruel estrangement from
the companion he most loved, I have remembered
this little scene with comfort and pleasure, and
known that he was not altogether alone in life,
and that he had good friends who cared for his
genius and tended him to the last. Of their affec-
tion he was aware. But of their constant secret
material guardianship he was unconscious ; the
basket he evidently hated, the woman he turned
to with most grateful response and dependence.
He was to the very end absorbed in his music, in
his art, in his love. He had bestowed without
counting all that he had to give : he poured it
forth upon others, never reckoning the cost ; and
then dying away from it all, he in turn took what
came to him as a child might do, without ponder-
ing or speculating overmuch.
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH
Ill
I BEGAN life at four or five years old as a fervent
Napoleon ist. The great emperor had not been
dead a quarter of a century when I was a little
child. He was certainly alive in the hearts of the
French people and of the children growing up
among them. Influenced by the cook, we adored
his memory, and the concierge had a clock with a
laurel wreath which from some reason kindled all
our enthusiasm.
As a baby holding my father's finger I had
stared at the second funeral of Napoleon sweeping
up the great roadway of the Champs Elysees.
The ground was white with new-fallen snow, and
I had never seen snow before ; it seemed to me
to be a part of the funeral, a mighty pall indeed
spread for the obsequies of so great a warrior. It
was the snow I thought about, though I looked
with awe at' the black and glittering carriages
o o o
which came up like ships sailing past us, noiseless-
ly one by one. They frightened me, for I thought
there was a dead emperor in each. This weird
procession gave a strange importance to the mem-
32 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
ory of the great emperor, and also to the little
marble statuette of him on the nursery chimney-
piece. It stood with folded arms contemplating
the decadence of France, black and silent and re-
proachful. France was no longer an empire, only
a kingdom just like any other country ; this fact I
and the cook bitterly resented. Besides the statu-
ette there was a snuff-box, belonging I know not
to whom, that was a treasure of emotional awe.
It came out on Sundays, and sometimes of an
evening just before bed -time. At first as you
looked you saw nothing but the cover of a wooden
box ornamented by a drawing in brown sepia, the
sketch of a tombstone and a weeping willow-tree
nothing more. Then if you looked again, indi-
cated by ingenious twigs and lines there gradually
dawned upon you the figure, the shadowy figure
of him who lay beneath the stone. Napoleon, pale
and sad, with folded arms, with his cocked hat
crushed forward on his brow, the mournful shade
of the conqueror who had sent a million of other
men to Hades before him.
As we gazed we hated the English. It is true I
was very glad they always conquered everybody,
and that my grandpapa was a major in their army;
but at the same time the cook and I hated the
perfidious English, and we felt that if Napoleon
had not been betrayed he would still have been
rei^nincr over us here in Paris.
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 33
Every day we children used to go with our
bonne to play round about the Arc de Triomphe
near which w r e lived, and where, alternating with
ornamental rosettes, the long lists of Napoleon's
battles and triumphs were carved upon the stone.
The bonne sat at work upon one of the stone
benches which surround the Arc, we made gravel
pies on the step at her feet and searched for shells
in the sand, or, when we were not prevented by the
guardian, swung on the iron chains which divide
the enclosure from the road. We paid no atten-
tion whatever to the inscriptions, in fact we couldn't
read very \vell in those days. We hardly ever
looked at the groups of statuary, except that there
was one great arm carrying a shield, and a huge
leg like the limb in the Castle of Otranto which
haunted us, and which we always saw, though we
tried not to see it. I never remember being very
light-hearted or laughing at my play up by the
Arc, a general sense of something grim and great
and strange and beyond my small ken impressed
itself upon me as we played. \Vhen I had night-
mares at night the Arc de Triomphe, with its
writhing figures, was always mixed up with them.
One day the guardian in his brass buttons, being
in a good humor, allowed us all to climb up with-
out paying to the flat lead terrace on the top.
There were easy steps inside the walls, and slits
34 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
for light at intervals ; and when we climbed the
last steep step and came out upon the sum-
mit, we saw the great view, the domes and the
pinnacles and gilt weathercocks of the lovely city
all spreading before us, and the winding river, and
the people looking like grains of sand blown by
the wind, and the carriages crawling like insects,
and the palace of the Tuileries in its lovely old
gardens shining like a toy. But somehow the
world from a monumental height is quite different
from what it seems from a curb-stone, where much
more human impressions are to be found ; and that
disembodied Paris, spreading like a vision, never
appeared to me to be the same place as the noisy,
cheerful, beloved city of my early childish recol-
lections.
The first house in which we lived at Paris was an
old house in an old avenue enclosed by iron gates
which were shut at night. It was called the Av-
enue Sainte Marie and led from the Faubourg du
Roule to the Arc de Triomphe. The avenue was
planted with shady trees ; on one side there were
houses, on the other convent walls. At the door of
one of the houses an old man sat in his chair, who
used to tell us, as we passed by, that in a few
months he would be a hundred years old, and then
they would put him into the papers. I used to play
in the court-yard belonging to the house in which
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 35
we lived. There was a pump and there was a wall
with a row of poplar trees beyond it. There was a
faded fresco painted on the wall, a dim fountain, a
pale Italian garden, a washed-out bird flying away,
with a blue tail, across long streaks of mildew that
had come from the drippings of the trees. Frescos
must have been in fashion at the time when the
Avenue Sainte Marie was built, for there was also
a dim painting on the convent wall opposite our
portc-cocJicrc, representing a temple in a garden,
and clouds, and another bird with outstretched
wings. From beyond this wall we used to hear
the bells and the litanies of the nuns. One night
I dreamed that I was walking in the convent garden
and that my father came out of the temple to fetch
me home, and that the bird flapped its wings with a
shrill cry. I used to dream a great deal when I was
a little child, and then wake up in my creaking
wooden bed and stare at the dim floating night-
light like a little ship on its sea of oil. Then from
the dark corners of the room there used to come
all sorts of strange things sailing up upon the dark-
ness. I could see them all, looking like painted
pictures. There were flowers, birds, dolls, toys,
shining things of every description. I have since
heard that this seeing pictures in the dark is not
an uncommon faculty among children. I had a
vague feeling that the pictures came from the
36 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
house of the nuns. My sister being a baby, I had
only the porter's niece to play with. She was
older than I was, and used to go to school at
the convent. She used to wear a black stuff pin-
afore and a blue ribbon with the image of the
Virgin round her neck. As we played we could
hear other music than that of the nuns, the brilliant
strains of Monsieur Ernest's piano in the apartment
over ours. He was a kind young man, very fond
of children, who used to open the window and play
to us brilliant dances and marches, which we de-
lighted in. When he ceased we went back to our
games.
It was later in life that with the help, either of
Justine or another relation of the family, I tried to
polish up the stairs as a surprise for the porter on
his return from an errand. We got the long brooms
and sticks out of the lodge where there was nobody
to be seen, only an odd smell and a great pot sim-
mering by the fire. One of us carried a feather
broom, the other a brush with a strap to it, and a
great stick with a bit of wax at one end. Then
we set to work, not forgetting the hissing sound.
Justine flapped about with the feather broom and
duster; I tried to work my foot with the heavy
brush ; but the brush flies off, down I come on
my nose with a scream, the broom clatters echo-
ing down the stairs, the waxed stick falls over the
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 37
bannisters, doors open, voices are heard, I have
thumped my nose, bumped my forehead, but I do
not mind the pain the disgrace,' the failure, are
what are so terrible to bear !
I cannot clearly remember when I became an
Orleanist, but I think I must have been about six
years old at the time, standing tiptoe on the afore-
said curb-stone. My grandmother had changed her
cook and her apartment, and I had happened to
hear my grandfather say that Napoleon was a rascal
who had not been betrayed by the English. Then
came a day shall I ever forget it ? when a yellow
carriage jingled by with a beautiful little smiling
boy at the window, a fair-haired, blue-eyed prince.
It was the little Comte de Paris, who would be a
king some day, they told me, and who was smiling
and looking so charming that then and there I
deserted my colors and went over to the camp of
the Orleans. Alas! that the lilies of France should
have been smirched and soiled by base and vulgar
intrigues, and that my little prince should have
stepped down unabashed, as a gray-headed veteran,
from the dignified shrine of his youth. I remember
once hearing my father say of the Due d'Aumale,
" He has everything in his favor good looks, dig-
nity, fine manners, intellect, riches, and, above all,
misfortune ;" and with all of these I invested the
image of my o\vn particular little prince.
38 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
One micareme, on that mysterious pagan feast
of the butchers, when the fat ox, covered with gar-
lands and with gilded horns, is led to sacrifice
through the streets of Paris, I also, to my great
satisfaction, was brought forth to join the proces-
sion by a couple of maids, one of whom carried a
basket. I remember finding my stumpy self in a
court of the Tuileries, the fairy ox having been
brought thither for the benefit of the king, and I
was hustled to the front of a crowd and stood be-
tween my two protectors looking up at a window.
Then comes an outcry of cheering, and a venerable,
curly-headed old gentleman, Louis Philippe him-
self, just like all his pictures, appears for an instant
behind the glass, and then the people shout again
and again, and the window opens, and the king
steps out on to the balcony handing out an old
lady in a bonnet and frizzed white curls, and, yes,
the little boy is there too. Hurrah, hurrah ! for all
the kings and queens ! And somebody is squeez-
ing me up against the basket, but I am now an Or-
leanist and ready to suffer tortures for the kind old
grandpapa and the little boy. Now that I am a
gray-headed woman I feel as if I could still stand
in the crowd and cry hurrah for honest men who,
with old Louis Philippe, would rather give up their
crowns than let their subjects be fired upon ; and
if my little prince, instead of shabbily intriguing
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 39
with adventurers, had kept to his grandfather's
peacetul philosophy, I could have cried hurrah
for him still with all my heart.
I suppose we have most of us, in and out of our
pinafores, stood by triumphal archways put up for
other people, and moralized a little bit before pro-
ceeding to amuse ourselves with our own advent-
ures further on. As I have said, the Arc de Tri-
omphe seems mixed up with all my early life. I
remember looking up at it on my way to my first
school in an adjoining street, crossing the open
space, and instead of stopping to pick up shells
as usual, casting, I dare say, a complaisant glance
of superiority at the gods of war in their stony
chariots, who, after all, never had much education.
I was nicely dressed in a plaid frock, and wore two
tails of hair tied with ribbons, a black apron, and
two little black pantalettes. It was the admired
costume of all the young ladies of the school to
which I was bound. On this occasion the stony
gods witnessed my undue elation and subsequent
discomfiture unmoved. The triumphal arch was
certainly not intended for my return. I was led
home that evening, after a day mostly spent in the
corner, crestfallen and crushed by my inferiority
to all the other young ladies of the school in their
black pinafores and pantalettes.
4-O CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
But the images round about the Arc are not all of
discomfitures and funerals and terrible things. There
were also merry-makings to be remembered. Did
not the Siamese Twins themselves set up their
booths in its shadow in company with various wild
Bedouins their companions? I thought it cruel of
the nurse not to take me in to see the show, and
indeed on one occasion I ran away from home to
visit it on my own account. The expedition was
not a success, but Siam has always seemed to me
an interesting country ever since. Besides the
twins and their booth, there were cafes and resting-
places in those days all round about the Arc, and
people enjoying themselves after their long day's
work with song and laughter. Wild flowers were
still growing at the upper end of the Champs
Elysees on a green mound called the Pelouse.
In the year '48, when we walked out with our
grandparents, the Pelouse had been dug up and
levelled, I think, to give work to the starving peo-
ple. It was a year of catastrophes and revolutions;
a sort of " General Post " among kings and gov-
ernments. Many of the promenaders (my grand-
parents among them) used to wear little tricolor ro-
settes to show their sympathies with the Republic.
Shall I ever forget the sight of the enthusiastic
crowds lining the way to see the President entering
Paris in a cocked hat on a curveting Arabian steed
MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 41
at the head of his troops? to be followed in a year
or two by the still more splendid apparition of Na-
poleon III. riding into Paris along the road the
great Emperor's hearse had taken a new emperor,
glittering and alive once more, on a horse so beau-
tiful and majestic that to look upon it was a martial
education !
The pomp and circumstance of war were awak-
ened again, and troops came marching up the av-
enues as before, and, what is even more vivid to
my mind, a charming empress presently rose be-
fore us, winning all hearts by her grace and her
beautiful toilettes. My sister and I stood by the
roadside on her wedding-day and watched her car-
riage rolling past the Arc to St. Cloud ; the morn-
ing had been full of spring sunshine, but the after-
noon was bleak and drear, and I remember how we
shivered as we stood. Some years later, when we
were no longer little girls, but young ladies in crin-
olines, we counted the guns fired for the birth of
the Prince Imperial at the Tuileries.
MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
IV
OUR father was away in America, and we were
living once more with our grandparents. We were
children no longer, but were young ladies supposed
to be finishing our education. It will be seen that it
was of a fitful and backward description. Macau-
lay's Essays, Ivanhoe and the Talisman, Herodotus,
Milman's History of the Jcivs, and one or two stray
scraps of poetry represented our studies. Then
came a vast and hopeless chaos in our minds, reach-
ing as far back as the times of Charlemagne and
Clovis, and Bertha with the long foot, and Frede-
gonde who was always plunging her dagger into
somebody's back. The early Merovingians will for
me ever be associated with a faint smell of snuff
and a plaid linen pocket-handkerchief carefully
folded, with a little, old, short, stumpy figure, in a
black cap and dressed in a scanty black skirt. The
figure is that of my Professor of History. An old,
old lady, very short, very dignified, uttering little
grunts at intervals, and holding a pair of spectacles
in one hand and a little old black fat book in the
other, from which, with many fumblings and snuff-
46 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
takings, the good soul would proceed to read to
us of murder, battle, rapine, and sudden death, of
kings, crowns, dynasties, and knights in armor,
while we, her pupils, listened, trying not to laugh
when she turned two pages at once, or read the
same page twice over with great seriousness.
My dear grandmother, who was always inventing
ways of helping people, and who firmly believed in
all her proteges, having visited our Madame once
or twice and found her absorbed in the said history
book, had arranged that a series of historical lect-
ures, with five-franc tickets of admission to the
course, should be given by her during the winter
months; and that after the lecture (which used to
take place in our sitting-room, and which was at-
tended by a certain number of ladies) we should all
adjourn for tea to the blue drawing-room, where
the Major meanwhile had been able to enjoy his
after-dinner nap in quiet. He refused to attend the
course, saying, after the first lecture, that he found
it difficult to follow the drift of Madame's argu-
ments. There used to be a class of four girls my
sister and myself, our cousin Amy, and Laura C., a
friend of my own age and then the various ladies,
in bonnets, from up-stairs and down-stairs and next
door. The lecture lasted an hour by the clock;
then the meeting suddenly adjourned, and by the
time the golden flower-vase pendule in the drawing-
MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 47
room struck ten everybody was already walking
down the shiny staircase and starting for home.
Paris streets at night may be dark and muddy, or
freezing cold, but they never give one that chill,
vault-like feeling which London streets are apt to
produce when one turns out from a warm fireside
into the raw night. The ladies thought nothing of
crossing the road and walking along a boulevard till
they reached their own doors. Good old Madame
used to walk off with those of her pupils who lived
her way ; they generally left her at the bright
chemist's shop round the corner, where Madame
Marlin, the chemist's wife, would administer an
evening dose of peppermint-water to keep out the
cold so we used to be told by Madame. The old
lady lived in one of the tall, shabby houses at the
top of the Faubourg, just behind the Arc. We
used to find her sitting in a small crowded room,
with a tiny ante-room, and an alcove for her bed.
There she lived with her poodle, Bibi, among the
faded treasures and ancient snuff-boxes and books
and portraits and silhouettes of a lifetime; grim
effigies of a grim past somewhat softened by dust
and time. In the midst of all the chaos one
lovely miniature used to hang, shining like a star
through the clouds of present loneliness and the
spiders' webs of age and poverty. This was the por-
trait of the beautiful Lady Almeria Carpenter, the
48 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
friend of Sir Joshua, with whom in some mysterious,
romantic way Madame was connected. Another
equally valued relic was a needlebook which had
been used by the Duchesse de Praslin on the day
when her husband murdered her. Madame's sister
had been governess there for many years, and had
loved the duchess dearly and been valued by her, and
many and mysterious were the confidences poured
into my grandmother's ear concerning this sad
tragedy. Our cheery, emphatic, mysterious old lady
was very popular among us all. One of her kindest
friends was my father's cousin, Miss R., who had
lived in Paris all her life, and whose visiting-list com-
prised any one in trouble or poor or lonely and
afflicted. I think if it had not been for her help and
that of my grandmother our good old friend would
have often gone through sore trials. When my
father himself came to Paris to fetch us away, he was
interested in the accounts he heard of the old lady
from his mother and cousin. And Madame is the
heroine of a little story which I have seen in print
somewhere, and which I know to be true, for was I
not sent one day to search for a certain pill-box in
my father's room, of which he proceeded to empty
the contents into the fireplace, and then, drawing
a neat banker's roll from his pocket, to fill up the
little cube with a certain number of new napoleons,
packing them in closely up to the brim. After
MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 49
which, the cover being restored, he wrote the fol-
lowing prescription in his beautiful, even handwrit-
ing: "Madame P. ... To be taken occasionally
when required. Signed Dr. W. M. T." Which medi-
cine my grandmother, greatly pleased, promised to
administer to her old friend after our departure.
P.S. The remembrance of this pill-box, and of my
father's kind hands packing up the napoleons, came
to me long after at a time when misfortunes of
every kind had fallen upon the familiar friends and
places of our early youth, when the glare of burn-
ing Paris seemed to reach us far away in our Eng-
lish homes, and we almost thought we could hear
the thunders breaking on the unhappy city. We
thought of our poor old lady, alone with her dear
Bibi, in the midst of all this terror and destruction.
As we sat down to our legs of mutton we pictured
the horrible salmis and fricandeanx of rats and
mice to which our neighbors were reduced, the
sufferings so heroically borne. Every memory of
the past rose up to incite us to make some effort
to come to the assistance of our poor old friend ;
and at last it occurred to me to ask Baroness Mayer
de Rothschild, who was always ready with good
help for others, whether it would be possible to
communicate with my besieged old lady.
I do not know by what means perhaps if I knew,
50 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
I ought not to say how communications had been
established between the English Rothschilds and
those who were still in Paris. Some trusty and de-
voted retainer, some Porthos belonging to the
house, had been able to get into Paris carrying let-
ters and messages and food, and he was, so the
Baroness now told me, about to return again. By
this means I was told that I might send my letters
and a draft on the bank in Paris so that poor
Madame could obtain a little help of which she
must be in cruel need; and this being accom-
plished, the letter written and the money sent off,
I was able with an easier mind to enjoy my own
share of the good things of life. Time passed, the
siege was raised, and then came a day when, urged
by^ circumstances, and perhaps also by a certain
curiosity, I found myself starting for Paris with a
friend, under the escort of Mr. Cook, arriving after
a night's journey through strange and never-to-be-
forgotten experiences at the Gare du Nord a de-
serted station among streets all empty and silent.
Carriages were no longer to be seen, every figure
was dressed in black, and the women's sad faces
and long, floating crape veils seemed strangely
symbolical and visionary, as I walked along to the
house of my father's cousin, Charlotte R., who had
been my friend ever since I could remember. She
was expecting me in her home to which she had
MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 51
only been able to return a few days before. It is
not my purpose here to describe the strange and
pathetic experiences and the sights we saw to-
gether during that most eventful week; the sun-
shine of it all, the smoking ruins, the piteous his-
tories, the strange rebound of life even in the midst
of its ashes. The Arc itself was wrapped in sack-
cloth to preserve the impassive gods from the in-
juries of war. The great legs and arms we repacked
in straw and saw-dust to protect them. One of my
first questions was for Madame. " She is particu-
larly well," said my cousin, smiling. " She has added
many thrilling histories to repertoire, Madame Mar-
tin's escape from the obus, Bibi's horror of the
Prussians you must come and see her, and hear
it all for yourself." " I particularly want to see her,"
said I. I was in a self-satisfied and not unnatural
frame of mind, picturing my old lady's pleasure
at the meeting, her eloquent emotion and satisfac-
tion at the trouble I had taken on her behalf. I
hoped to have saved her life ; at all events I felt
that she must owe many little comforts to my ex-
ertions, and that her grateful benediction awaited
me !
Dear old Madame was sitting with her poodle on
her knees in the same little dark and crowded
chamber. She put down her spectacles, shut up
her book I do believe it was still the little black
52 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
History of France. She did not look in the least
surprised to see me walk in. The room smelt of
snuff just as usual ; Bibi leaped up from her lap,
barking furiously. " Ah ! my dear child," said the
old lady calmly, " how do you do ? Ah, my dear
Miss R., I am delighted to see you again ! Only
this day I said to Madame Martin, ' I think Miss
R. will be sure to call this afternoon ; it is some day
since she come.' " Then turning to me, " Well, my
dear A., and how do you, and how do you all ? Are
you come to stay in our poor Paris ? Are Mr. and
Mrs. T. with you? Oh! oh! Oh, those Prussians!
those abominable monsters! My poor Bibi, he
was ready to tear them to pieces ; he and I could
not sleep for the guns. Madame Martin, she say
to me, 'Oh ! Madame, can you believe such wicked-
ness?' I say to her, 'it is abominable.' Oh, there
is no word for it !"
All this was oddly familiar, and yet strangely
thrilling and unreal as was all the rest. There is no
adequate expression for the strange waking night-
mare which seems to seize one when by chance one
meets a whole country suffering from one over-
powering idea, and when one hears the story of
each individual experience in turn repeated and re-
peated.
At last, my own personal interests rising up
again, I said, not without some curiosity : " And
MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 53
now I want to ask you, did you get my letter,
Madame, and did you receive the money safely
from Messrs. Rothschilds' bank?"
" I thank you, my dear child. I received it I
was about to mention the subject I knew you
would not forget your old friend," said Madame
solemnly. " I needed the money very much," with
a shake of the head. " I was all the more grateful
that it came at the time it did. You will be grati-
fied, I know, to learn the use to which I put it.
They had come round to every house in the street
only that morning. Madame Martin was with me."
Here Madame took a pinch of snuff very seriously.
" She go to the banker's for me, and she took the
money at once and inscribe my name on the list."
"The list?" said I, much bewildered.
" I subscribe it," said Madame, " to the cannon
which was presented by our qnarticr to the city of
Paris."
"What, all of it?" said I.
" Yes, all of it," said she. " Do you suppose I
should have kept any of it back?"
MY WITCHES' CALDRON
V
IT happily does not always follow that one cares
for an author in exact proportion to the sale of his
books, or even to the degree of their merit ; other-
wise some might be overpowered by friends, and
others remain solitary all their lives long. It also
does not always follow that people who write books
are those who see most of one another. On the
contrary, authors as a rule, I think, prefer play-
mates of other professions than their own, and
don't keep together in the same way that soldiers
do for instance, or dandies, or lawyers, or members
of Parliament. Lawyers, politicians, soldiers, and
even doctors, do a great deal of their work together
in one another's company; but the hours don't suit
for literary people, and one rarely hears of five or six
authors sitting down in a row to write books. They
are generally shut up apart in different studies, with
strict orders given that nobody is to be shown in.
This was my father's rule, only it was constantly
broken ; and many persons used to pass in and out
during his working-times, coming to consult him,
or to make suggestions ; some came to call, others
58 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
brought little poems and articles for the CornJiill.
. . . As I write on it seems to me that my memory
is a sort of Witches' Caldron, frpm which rise one
by one these figures of the past, and they go by in
turn and vanish one by one into the mist some
are kings and queens in their own right, some are
friends, some are dependants. From my caldron
rise many figures crowned and uncrowned, some of
whom I have looked upon once perhaps, and then
realized them in after-life from a different point of
view. Now, perhaps, looking back, one can tell
their worth better than at the time ; one knows
which were the true companions, which were the
teachers and spiritual pastors, which were but shad
ows after all. The most splendid person I ever re
member seeing had a little pencil sketch in his
hand, which he left behind him upon the table. It
was a very feeble sketch ; it seemed scarcely possi-
ble that so grand a being should not be a bolder
draughtsman. He appeared to us one Sunday
morning in the sunshine. When I came down to'
breakfast I found him sitting beside my father at
the table, with an untasted cup of tea before him ;
he seemed to fill the bow-window with radiance as
if he were Apollo ; he leaned against his chair with
one elbow resting on its back, with shining studs
and curls and boots. We could see his horse look-
ing in at us over the blind. It was indeed a si<jht
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 59
for little girls to remember all their lives. I think
my father had a certain weakness for dandies,
those knights of the broadcloth and shining fronts.
Magnificent apparitions used to dawn upon us in
the hall sometimes, glorious beings on their way to
the study, but this one outshone them all. I came
upon a description in Lord Lamington's Book of
Dandies the other day, which once more evoked
the shining memory. Our visitor was Count
D'Orsay, of whom Lord Lamington says :
" When he appeared in the perfection of dress (for the
tailor's art had not died out with George IV.), with that
expression of self-confidence and complacency which the
sense of superiority gives, he was the observed of all ! In
those days men took great pains with themselves, they did
not slouch and moon thro' life. ... I have frequently ridden
down to Richmond with Count D'Orsay ; a striking figure
he was; his blue coat, thrown well back to show the wide
expanse of snowy shirt-front, his buff waistcoat, his light
leathers and polished boots, his well-curled whiskers and
handsome countenance; a wide-brimmed glossy hat, and
spotless white gloves."
Mr. Richard Doyle used to tell us a little story
of a well-known literary man who was so carried
away by the presence of the brilliant D'Orsay
at some city banquet that in a burst of enthusi-
asm he was heard to call aloud, above the din of
voices, " Waiter ! for Heaven's sake bring melted
butter for the flounder of the Count." The Count
60 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
must have been well used to melted butter, as he
proceeded on his triumphant road, nor did his
genius fail him to the last. I have read some-
where a curious description of the romantic sar-
cophagus he finally devised for himself in a sort of
temple, a flight of marble steps leading to a marble
shrine where he was duly laid when he died, not
long after his return to his own country and to the
land of his fathers. He is of that race of men who
lived in the beginning of the century, magnificent
performers of life's commonplaces, representative
heroes and leaders of the scene. Byron belonged
to the brilliant company, and greatly admired
Count D'Orsay. There is a certain absence of the
florid, a frozen coldness in the fashion of to-day
which strikes those who remember the more flam-
boyant generation.
I remember a visit from another hero of those
times. We were walking across Kensington Square
early one morning, when we heard some one hur-
rying after us and calling, " Thackeray, Thackeray !""
This was also one of Byron's friends a bright-
eyed, active old man, with long, wavy white hair,
and a picturesque cloak flung over one shoulder. I
can see him still, as he crossed the corner of the
square and followed us with a light, rapid step. My
father, stopping short, turned back to meet him,
greeting him kindly, and bringing him home with
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 61
us to the old brown house at the corner where we
were then living. There was a sort of eagerness
and vividness of manner about the stranger which
was very impressive. You could not help watch-
ing him and his cloak, which kept slipping from
its place, and which he caught at again and again.
We wondered at his romantic, foreign looks, and
his gayety and bright, eager way. Afterwards we
were told that this was Leigh Hunt. We knew
his name very well, for on the drawing-room table,
in company with various Ruskins and Punches, lay
a pretty, shining book called A Jar of Honey from
Mount Hybla, from which, in that dilettante, childish
fashion which is half play, half impatience, and search
for something else, we had contrived to extract our
own allowance of honey. It was still an event to
see a real author in those days, specially an au-
thor with a long cloak flung over his shoulder ;
though, for the matter of that, it is still and always
will be an event to see the faces and hear the voices
of those whose thoughts have added something
delightful to our lives. Not very long afterwards
came a different visitor, still belonging to that same
company of people. I had thrown open the dining-
room door and come in, looking for something, and
then I stopped short, for the room was not empty.
A striking and somewhat alarming -looking person
stood alone by the fireplace with folded arms a
62 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
dark, impressive -looking man, not tall, but broad
and brown and weather-beaten gazing with a sort
of scowl at his own reflection in the glass. As I
entered he turned slowly and looked at me over
his shoulder. This time it was Trelawny, Byron's
biographer and companion, who had come to see
my father. He frowned, walked deliberately and
slowly from the room, and I saw him no more.
As I have said, all these people now seem almost
like figures out of a fairy tale. One could almost
as well imagine Sindbad, or Prince Charming, or the
Seven Champions of Christendom dropping in for
an hour's chat. But each generation, however mat-
ter-of-fact it may be, sets up fairy figures in turn,
to wonder at and delight in. I had not then read
any of the books which have since appeared, though
I had heard my elders talking, and I knew from
hearsay something of the strange, pathetic, irration-
al histories of these by-gone wanderers searching
the world for the Golden Fleece and the Enchanted
Gardens. These were the only members of that
special, impracticable, romantic crew of Argonauts
I ever saw, though I have read and reread their
histories and diaries so that I seem to know them
all, and can almost hear their voices.
One of the most notable persons who ever came
into our old bow-windowed drawing-room in Young
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 63
Street is a guest never to be forgotten by me a
tiny, delicate little person, whose small hand nev-
ertheless grasped a mighty lever which set all the
literary world of that day vibrating. I can still see
the scene quite plainly ! the hot summer evening,
the open windows, the carriage driving to the door
as we all sat silent and expectant ; my father, who
rarely waited, waiting with us ; our governess and
my sister and I all in a row, and prepared for the
great event. We saw the carriage stop, and out of
it sprang the active, well-knit figure of young Mr.
George Smith, who was bringing Miss Bronte to
see our father. My father, who had been walking
up and down the room, goes out into the hall to
meet his guests, and then, after a moment's delay,
the door opens wide, and the two gentlemen come
in, leading a tiny, delicate, serious little lady, pale,
with fair, straight hair, and steady eyes. She may
be a little over thirty ; she is dressed in a little
barege dress with a pattern of faint green moss.
She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness ;
our hearts are beating with wild excitement. This,
then, is the authoress, the unknown power whose
books have set all London talking, reading, specu-
lating ; some people even say our father wrote the
books the wonderful books. To say that we little
girls had been given Jane Eyre to read scarcely rep-
resents the facts of the case ; to say that we had
64 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
taken it without leave, read bits here and read bits
there, been carried away by an undreamed-of and
hitherto unimagined whirlwind into things, times,
places, all utterly absorbing and at the same time
absolutely unintelligible to us, would more accu-
rately describe our states of mind on that summer's
evening as we look at Jane Eyre the great Jane
Eyre the tiny little lady. The moment is so
breathless that dinner comes as a relief to the so-
lemnity of the occasion, and we all smile as my fa-
ther stoops to offer his arm, for, genius though she
may be, Miss Bronte can barely reach his elbow.
My own personal impressions are that she is some-
what grave and stern, specially to forward little
girls who wish to chatter. Mr. George Smith has
since told me how she afterwards remarked upon
my father's wonderful forbearance and gentleness
with our uncalled-for incursions into the conversa-
tion. She sat gazing at him with kindling eyes of
interest, lighting up with a sort of illumination ev-
ery now and then as she answered him. I can see
her bending forward over the table, not eating, but
listening to what he said as he carved the dish be-
fore him.
I think it must have been on this very occasion
that my father invited some of his friends in the
evening to meet Miss Bronte, for everybody was in-
terested and anxious to see her. Mrs. Crowe, the
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 65
reciter of ghost-stories, was there. Mrs. Brookfield,
Mrs. Carlyle Mr. Carlyle himself was present, so I
am told, railing at the appearance of cockneys
upon Scotch mountain-sides ; there were also too
many Americans for his taste ; " but the Americans
were as God compared to the cockneys," says the
philosopher. Besides the Carlyles, there were Mrs.
Elliott and Miss Perry, Mrs. Procter and her daugh-
ter, most of my father's habitual friends and com-
panions. In the recent life of Lord Houghton I
was amused to see a note quoted in which Lord
Houghton also was convened. Would that he had
been present ! perhaps the party would have gone
off better. It was a gloomy and a silent evening.
Every one waited for the brilliant conversation
which never began at all. Miss Bronte retired to
the sofa in the study, and murmured a low word
now and then to our kind governess, Miss Truelock.
The room looked very dark ; the lamp began to
smoke a little ; the conversation grew dimmer and
more dim ; the ladies sat round still expectant ; my
father was too much perturbed by the gloom and
the silence to be able to cope with it at all. Mrs.
Brookfield, who was in the doorway by the study,
near the corner in which Miss Bronte was sitting,
leaned forward with a little commonplace, since brill-
iance was not to be the order of the evening. "Do
you like London, Miss Bronte?" she said. Another
66 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
silence, a pause; then Miss Bronte answers "Yes"
and " No " very gravely. My sister and I were much
too young to be bored in those days ; alarmed, im-
pressed we might be, but not yet bored. A party
was a party, a lioness was a lioness ; and shall I
confess it ? at that time an extra dish of biscuits
was enough to mark the evening. We felt all the
importance of the occasion tea spread in the din-
ing-room, ladies in the drawing-room. We roamed
about inconveniently, no doubt, and excitedly; and
in one of my excursions crossing the hall, towards
the close of the entertainment, I was surprised to
see my father opening the front door with his hat
on. He put his fingers to his lips, walked out into
the darkness, and shut the door quietly behind
him. When I went back to the drawing-room
again, the ladies asked me where he was. I vague-
ly answered that I thought he was coming back. I
was puzzled at the time, nor was it all made clear
to me till long years afterwards, when one day Mrs.
Procter asked me if I knew what had happened
once when my father had invited a party to meet
Jane Eyre at his house. It was one of the dullest
evenings she had ever spent in her life, she said.
And then with a good deal of humor she described
the situation the ladies who had all come expect-
ing so much delightful conversation, and how as
the evening went on the gloom and the constraint
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 67
increased, and how finally, after the departure of
the more important guests, overwhelmed by the
situation, my father had quietly left the room, left
the house, and gone off to his club. The ladies
waited, wondered, and finally departed also ; and
as we were going up to bed with our candles after
everybody was gone, I remember two pretty Miss
L s, in shiny silk dresses, arriving, full of ex-
pectation. . . . We still said we thought our father
would soon be back ; but the Miss L s declined
to wait upon the chance, laughed, and drove away
again almost immediately.
Since writing the preceding lines, I have visited
Jane Eyre land, and stayed in the delightful home
where she used to stay with Mrs. Gaskell. I have
seen signs and tokens of her presence, faint sketch-
es vanishing away, the delicate writing in the beau-
tiful books she gave that warm friend ; and I have
also looked for and reread the introduction to
Emma, that " last sketch " and most touching chap-
ter in the never-to-be-written book of Charlotte
Bronte's happy married life. The paper is signed
" W. M. T. ;" it was written by the editor, and is
printed in one of the very earliest numbers of the
Cornliill Magazine.
I remember the trembling little frame, the little
68 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
hand, the great honest eyes ; an impetuous honesty
seemed to me to characterize the woman. ... I fan-
cied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon
us and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals.
She gave me the impression of being a very pure
and lofty and high-minded person. A great and
holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be
with her always. Such in our brief interview she
appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so no-
ble, so lonely of that passion for truth of those
nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies,
invention, depression, elation, and prayer ; as one
reads of the necessarily incomplete though most
touching and admirable history of the heart that
throbbed in this one little frame of this one
among the myriads of souls that have lived and
died on this great earth this great earth ! this
little speck in the infinite universe of God, with
what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe
await to-morrow, when that which is now but dark-
ly seen shall be clear !
As I write out what my father's hand has writ-
ten my gossip is hushed, and seems to me like the
lamp smoke in the old drawing-room compared to
the light of the summer's night in the street outside.
I am suddenly conscious as I write that my ex-
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 69
pcriences arc very partial ; but a witch's caldron
must needs after all contain heterogeneous scraps,
and mine, alas ! can be no exception to the rest.
It produces nothing more valuable than odds and
ends happily harmless enough, neither sweltered
venom nor fillet of finny snake, but the back of
one great man's head, the hat and umbrella of an-
other. The first time I ever saw Mr. Gladstone I
only saw the soles of his boots. A friend had taken
me into the ventilator of the House of Commons,
where we listened to a noble speech and watched
the two shadows on the grating overhead of the
feet of the messenger of glad tidings. One special
back I cannot refrain from writing down, in a dark
blue frock-coat and strapped trousers, walking lei-
surely before us up Piccadilly. The sun is shining,
and an odd sort of brass buckle which fastens an
old-fashioned stock, flashes like a star. " Do look !"
I say. " Who is that old gentleman ?" " That old
gentleman ! Why, that is the Duke of Welling-
ton," said my father. On another occasion I re-
member some one coming up to us and beginning
to talk very charmingly, and among other things
describing some new lord mayor who had been
in state to a theatrical performance, by which it
seemed he had been much affected. " I cried, I do
assure you," the lord mayor had said, "and as for
the lady mayoress, she cry too ;" and the gentle-
70 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
man smiled and told the little story so dryly and
drolly that my sister and I couldn't help laughing,
and we went on repeating to one another after-
wards, " As for the lady mayoress, she cry too."
And then as usual we asked who was that. " Don't
you know Lord Palmerston by sight?" said my fa-
ther.
I have a friend who declares that Fate is a hu-
morist, linking us all together by strangest whims,
even by broad jokes at times ; and this vague little
humor of the weeping lady mayoress is my one per-
sonal link with the great Whig administrator of the
last generation.
Another miscellaneous apparition out of my cal-
dron rises before me as I write. On a certain day
we went to call at Mrs. Procter's with our father.
We found an old man standing in the middle of
the room, taking leave of his hostess, nodding his
head he was a little like a Chinese mandarin with
an ivory face. His expression never changed, but
seemed quite fixed. He knew my father, and spoke
to him and to us too, still in this odd, fixed way.
Then he looked at my sister. " My little girl," he
said to her, " will you come and live with me ? You
shall be as happy as the day is long; you shall have
a white pony to ride, and feed upon red -currant
jelly." This prospect was so alarming and unex-
pected that the poor little girl suddenly blushed up
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 71
and burst into tears. The old man was Mr. Sam-
uel Rogers, but happily he did not see her cry, for
he was already on his way to the door.
My father was very fond of going to the play,
and he used to take us when we were children, one
on each side of him, in a hansom. He used to take
us to the opera too, which was less of a treat. Mag-
nificent envelopes, with unicorns and heraldic em-
blazonments, used to come very frequently, contain-
ing tickets and boxes for the opera. In those days
we thought everybody had boxes for the opera as
a matter of course. We used to be installed in the
front places with our chins resting on the velvet
ledges of the box. For a time it used to be very
delightful, then sometimes I used suddenly to wake
up to find the singing still going on and on as in a
dream. I can still see Lablache, a huge reverberat-
ing mountain, a sort of Olympus, thundering forth
glorious sounds, and addressing deep resounding
notes to what seemed to me then a sort of fairy in
white. She stood on tiny feet, she put up a deli-
cate finger and sent forth a sweet vibration of song
in answer, sweeter, shriller, more charming every
instant. Did she fly right up into the air, or was it
my own head that came down with a sleepy nod ?
I slept, I awoke ; and each time I was conscious of
this exquisite floating ripple of music flowing in
and out of my dreams. The singer was Mademoi-
72 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
selle Sontag ; it was the " Elisire," or some such
opera, overflowing like a lark's carol. All the great
golden house applauded ; my father applauded. I
longed to hear more, but in vain I struggled, I only
slumbered again, waking from minute to minute to
see the lovely little lady in white still pouring forth
her melody to the thousand lights and people. I
find when I consult my faithful confidante and sym-
pathizer in these small memories of what is now so
nearly forgotten, that I am not alone in my admir-
ing impressions of this charming person. My con-
fidante is the Biographic Genera le, where I find an
account, no sleepy visionary impression, such as my
own, but a very definite and charming portrait of
the bright fairy of my dreams, of Mademoiselle
Sontag, Comtesse Rossi, who came to London in
1849 : " O n remarquait surtout la limpidite de ses
gammes chromatiques et 1'eclat de ses trilles . . .
Et toutes ces merveilles s'accomplissaient avec une
grace parfaite, sans que le regard fut jamais attriste
par le moindre effort. La figure charmante de Ma-
demoiselle Sontag, ses beaux yeux bleus, limpides
et doux, ses formes elegantes, sa taille elancee et
souple achevaient le tableau et completaient 1'en-
chantement."
It seems sad to have enjoyed this delightful per-
formance only in one's dreams, but under these hu-
miliating circumstances, when the whole world was
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 73
heaving and struggling to hear the great singer of
the North, and when the usual box arrived for the
" Figlia del Reggimento," my grandmother, who
was with us, invited two friends of her own, grown
up and accustomed to keep awake, and my sister
and I were not included in the party. We were not
disappointed, we imagined the songs for ourselves
as children do. We gathered all our verbenas and
geraniums for a nosegay and gave it to our guests
to carry, and watched the carriage roll off in the
twilight with wild hopes, unexpressed, that perhaps
the flowers would be cast upon the stage at the feet
of the great singer. But though the flowers re-
turned home again crushed and dilapidated, and
though we did not hear the song, it was a reality
for me, and lasted until a day long years after, when
I heard that stately and glorious voice flashing into
my darkness with a shock of amazement never to
be forgotten, and then and there realized how fu-
tile an imagination may be.
Alas ! I never possessed a note of music of my
own, though I have cared for it in a patient, unre-
quited way all my life long. My father always loved
music and understood it too ; he knew his opera
tunes by heart. I have always liked the little story
of his landing with his companions at Malta on his
way to the East, and as no one of the company
happened to speak Italian he was able to interpret
74 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
for the whole party by humming lines from various
operas, " ' Un biglietto Eccolo qua,' " says my fa-
ther to the man from the shore, " ' Lascia darem' la
mano,' " and he helped Lady T. up the gangway,
and so on. He used sometimes to bring Mr. Ella
home to dine with him, and he liked to hear his
interesting talk about music. Through Mr. Ella's
kindness the doors of the Musical Union flew open
wide to us.
My father used to write in his study at the back
of the house in Young Street. The vine shaded
his two windows, which looked out upon the bit of
garden and the medlar-tree and the Spanish jas-
mines of which the yellow flowers scented our old
brick walls. I can remember the tortoise belong-
ing to the boys next door crawling along the top
of the wall where they had set it, and making its
way between the jasmine sprigs. Jasmines won't
grow now any more, as they did then, in the gar-
dens of Kensington, nor will medlars and vine trees
take root and spread their green branches ; only
herbs and bulbs, such as lilies and Solomon's seals,
seem to flourish, though I have a faint hope that
all the things people put in will come up all right
some centuries hence, when London is resting and
at peace, and has turned into the grass-grown ruin
one so often hears described. Our garden was not
tidy (though on one grand occasion a man came
MY WITCHES CALDRON 75
to mow the grass), but it was full of sweet things.
There were verbenas red, blue, and scented ; and
there were lovely stacks of flags, blades of green
with purple heads between, and bunches of Lon-
don-pride growing luxuriantly; and there were
some blush-roses at the end of the garden which
were not always quite eaten up by the caterpillars.
Lady Duff Gordon came to stay with us once (it
was on that occasion, I think, that the grass was
mowed), and she afterwards sent us some doves,
which used to hang high up in a wicker cage from
the windows of the school-room. The top school-
room was over my father's bedroom, and the bed-
room was over the study where he used to write.
I liked the top school -room the best of all the
rooms in the dear old house ; the sky was in it, and
the evening bells used to ring into it across the
garden, and seemed to come in dancing and clang-
ing with the sunset ; and the floor sloped so that if
you put down a ball it would roll in a leisurely way
right across the room of its own accord. And then
there was a mystery a small trap -door between
the windows which we never could open. Where
did not that trap-do'or lead to? It was the gate-
way of Paradise, of many paradises to us. We kept
our dolls, our bricks, our books, our baby-houses in
the top room, and most of our stupid little fancies.
My little sister had a menagerie of snails and flies
76 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
in the sunny window-sill ; these latter, chiefly inva-
lids rescued out of milk-jugs, lay upon rose-leaves
in various little pots and receptacles. She was
very fond of animals, and so was my father at
least, he always liked our animals. Now, looking
back, I am full of wonder at the number of cats
we were allowed to keep, though De la Pluche,
the butler, and Gray, the housekeeper, waged war
against them. The cats used to come to us from
the garden, for then, as now, the open spaces of
Kensington abounded in fauna. My sister used to
adopt and christen them all in turn by the names
of her favorite heroes; she had Nicholas Nickleby,
a huge gray tabby, and Martin Chuzzlewit, and a
poor little half-starved Barnaby Rudge, and many
others. Their saucers used to be placed in a row
on the little terrace at the back of my father's
study, under the vine where the sour green grapes
grew not at all out of reach ; and at the farther
end of which was an empty greenhouse ornamented
by the busts of my father as a boy, and of a rela-
tion in a military cloak.
One of my friends she never lived to be an
old woman used to laugh and say that she had
reached the time of life when she loved to see
even the people her parents had particularly dis-
liked, just for the sake of old times. I don't know
how I should feel if I were to meet one agreeable,
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 77
cordial gentleman, who used to come on horseback
and invite us to all sorts of dazzling treats and en-
tertainments which, to our great disappointment,
my father invariably refused, saying, " No, I don't
like him ; I don't want to have anything to do with
him." The wretched man fully justified these ob-
jections by getting himself transported long after
for a protracted course of peculiarly deliberate and
cold-blooded fraud. On one occasion, a friend told
me, he was talking to my father, and mentioning
some one in good repute at the time, and my fa-
ther incidentally spoke as if he knew of a murder
that person had committed. " You know it, then !"
said the other man. " Who could have told you?"
My father had never been told, but he had known
it all along, he said ; and, indeed, he sometimes
spoke of this curious feeling he had about people
at times, as if uncomfortable facts in their past his-
tory were actually revealed to him. At the same
time I do not think anybody had a greater enjoy-
ment than he in other people's goodness and well-
doing ; he used to be proud of a boy's prizes at
school, he used to be proud of a woman's sweet
voice or of her success in housekeeping. He had
a friend in the Victoria Road hard by whose de-
lightful household ways he used to describe, and I
can still hear the lady he called " Jingleby " war-
bling " O du schone Miillerin," to his great delight.
78 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
Any generous thing or word seemed like something
happening to himself. I can remember, when David
Coppcrficld came out, hearing him saying, in his em-
phatic way, to my grandmother that " little Em'ly's
letter to old Peggotty was a masterpiece." I won-
dered to hear him at the time, for that was not at
all the part I cared for most, nor, indeed, could I
imagine how little Em'ly ever was so stupid as to
run away from Peggotty's enchanted house-boat.
But we each and all enjoyed in turn our share of
those thin green books full of delicious things, and
how glad we were when they came to our hands at
last, after our elders and our governess and our but-
ler had all read them in turn.
It is curious to me now to remember, considering
how little we met and what a long way off they
lived, what an important part the Dickens house-
hold played in our childhood. But the Dickens
books were as much a part of our home as our own
father's.
Certainly the Dickens children's parties were
shining facts in our early London days nothing
came in the least near them. There were other
parties and they were very nice but nothing to
compare to these ; not nearly so light, not nearly
so shining, not nearly so going round and round.
Perhaps so dear K. P. suggests it was not all as
brilliantly wonderful as I imagined it ; but most as-
MY WITCHES CALDRON 79
suredly the spirit of mirth and kindly jollity was
a reality to every one present, and the master of
the house had that wondrous fairy gift of leader-
ship. I know not what to call that power by which
he inspired every one with spirit and interest. One
special party I remember, which seemed to me to
go on for years with its kind, gay hospitality, its
music, its streams of children passing and repass-
ing. We were a little shy coming in alone in all
the consciousness of new shoes and ribbons, but
Mrs. Dickens called us to sit beside her till the
long sweeping dance was over, and talked to us as
if we were grown up, which is always flattering to
little girls. Then Miss Hogarth found us partners,
and we, too, formed part of the throng. I remem-
ber watching the white satin shoes and long flow-
ing white sashes of the little Dickens girls, who were
just about our own age, but how much more grace-
ful and beautifully dressed ! Our sashes were bright
plaids of red and blue (tributes from one of our
father's Scotch admirers. Is it ungrateful to con-
fess now after all these years that we could not
bear them ?), our shoes were only bronze. Shall I
own to this passing shadow amid all that radiance ?
But when people are once dancing they are all
equal again and happy.
Somehow after the music we all floated into a long
supper-room, and I found myself sitting near the
8o CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
head of the table by Mr. Dickens, with another little
girl much younger than myself; she wore a necklace
and pretty little sausage curls all round her head.
Mr. Dickens was very kind to the little girl, and
presently I heard him persuading her to sing, and
he put his arm round her to encourage her ; and
then, wonderful to say, the little girl stood up (she
was little Miss Hullah) and began very shyly, trem-
bling and blushing at first, but as she blushed and
trembled she sang more and more sweetly ; and then
all i\\Q jcuncsse dorcc, consisting of the little Dickens
boys and their friends, ranged along the supper-table,
clapped and clapped, and Mr. Dickens clapped too,
smiling and applauding her. And then he made a
little speech, with one hand on the table ; I think
it was thanking \\\z jcunesse dorc'e for their applause,
and they again clapped and laughed but here my
memory fails me, and everything grows very vague
and like a dream.
Only this much I do remember very clearly, that
we had danced and supped and danced again, and
that we were all standing in a hall lighted and hung
with bunches of Christmas green, and, as I have
said, everything seemed altogether magnificent and
important, more magnificent and important every
minute, for as the evening went on more and more
people kept arriving. The hall was crowded, and
the broad staircase was lined with little boys
MY WITCHES' CALDRON 81
thousands of little boys whose heads and legs and
arms were waving about together. They were
making a great noise, and talking and shouting,
and the eldest son of the house seemed to be mar-
shalling them. Presently their noise became a
cheer, and then another, and we looked up and
saw that our own father had come to fetch us, and
that his white head was there above the others ;
then came a third final ringing cheer, and some one
went up to him it was Mr. Dickens himself who
laughed and said quickly, "That is for you !" and
my father looked up surprised, pleased, touched,
settled his spectacles, and nodded gravely to the
little boys.
IN KENSINGTON
VI
OURS was more or less a bachelor's establishment,
and the arrangements of the house varied between
a certain fastidiousness and the roughest simplicity.
We had shabby table-cloths, alternating with some
of my grandmother's fine linen; we had old Derby
china for our dessert of dried figs and dry biscuits,
and a silver Flaxman teapot (which always poured
oblations of tea upon the cloth) for breakfast, also
three cracked cups and saucers of unequal patterns
and sizes. One morning, Jeames de la Pluche (so
my father's servant and factotum chose to call him-
self when he wrote to the papers) brought in a
hamper which had just arrived. When it was un-
packed we found, to our great satisfaction, that it
contained a lovely breakfast array: A china bowl
for my father's tea, ornamented with his initials in
gold amid a trellis of roses; beautiful cups for the
young ladies, lovely gilt milk-jugs, and a copy of
verses, not written, but put together out of printed
letters from the Times. I quote it from memory:
"Of esteem as a token
Fate preserve it unbroken
86 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
A friend sends this tea-dish of porcelain rare,
And with truth and sincerity
Wishes health and prosperity
To the famed M. A. Titmarsh of Vanity Fair."
We could not imagine who the friend was from
whom the opportune present had come. For many
breakfasts we speculated and wondered, guessing
one person and another in turn, while we sat at our
now elegant board, of which Dr. Oliver Holmes him-
self might have approved. Years afterwards, when
De la Pluche was taking leave of my father and sail-
ing for Australia, where he obtained a responsible
position, he said, reproachfully : "I sent you the
breakfast things; you guessed a great many people,
but you never guessed they came from me."
De la Pluche was devoted to my father, and next
to him he seemed the most important member of
the household. He was more than devoted. We
used to think he was a sorcerer. He used to guess
at my father's thoughts, plan for him, work for
him, always knew beforehand what he would like
far better than we ever did. I remember that we
almost cried on one occasion, thinking that our
father would ultimately prefer him to us. He used
to write to the papers and sign his letters, " Jeames
de la Pluche, 13 Young Street." (i Like to see my
last, miss?" he used to say, as he put down a paper
on the school-room table. He was a very good and
IN KENSINGTON 87
clever man, though a stern ruler. My father had a
real friendship and regard for him, and few of his
friends ever deserved it more. He lived alone
down-stairs, where he was treated with great defer-
ence, and had his meals served separately, I believe.
He always called my father "the Governor." He
was a little man, and was very like Holbein's pict-
ure of Sir Thomas More in looks. I remember on
one occasion coming away from some lecture or
entertainment. As we got out into the street it
was raining. " It has turned cold," said my father,
who was already beginning to be ill. At that mo-
ment a voice behind him said, "Coat, sir? Brought
it down ;" and there was De la Pluche, who had
brought his coat all the way from Kensington, help-
ing him on with it. My father thanked him, and
then mechanically felt in the pocket for a possible
cigar-case. "Cigar? Here," says De la Pluche, pop-
ping one into my father's mouth, and producing a
match ready lighted.
I sometimes hear from my old friend, and I hope
he may not be pained by reading of these childish
jealousies long past.
When we were children attending our classes we
used to be encouraged to study large sheets with
colored designs, representing the solar system and
its various intricacies. One can understand the
pictures in the book while one is looking at them,
88 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
but it is a very different thing from looking at pict-
ures to try to understand the reality as it exists
outside the print, and to stand on one's own door-
step trying to realize that the earth is turning one
way and the moon corkscrewing round it, and the
planets dancing their mighty course, and the fixed
stars disappearing all the time behind the opposite
roof, to say nothing of a possibility that one's feet
are up in the air and one's head hanging down below,
without any feeling of inconvenience, except, per-
haps, a certain bewilderment and confusion on most
subjects, which may, however, be peculiar to myself.
And so, looking back at one's own life, it is difficult
to fit all the events and chronologies quite accu-
rately into their places. If one tries to realize too
much at once, the impression is apt to grow chaotic
and unmeaning in its complexity ; you can't get
the proportions of events; and perhaps, indeed,
one of the compensating constituents of all our
various existences consists in that disproportion
which passing impressions happily take for us, arid
which they often retain notwithstanding the expe-
riences of years.
That little picture of Bewick's in which a
falling leaf conceals the sky, the road, the passing
gig and its occupants, has always seemed to me to
contain the secret of a philosophy which makes ex-
istence itself more possible than it would be if infin-
IN KENSINGTON 89
ity held its proportional place in our finite expe-
rience.
Our London home was a happy, but a very quiet
home. One day my father said that he had been
surprised to hear from his friend Sir Henry Davi-
son how seriously our house struck people, com-
pared to other houses: "But I think we are very
happy as we are," said he, and so, indeed, we were.
We lived chiefly with him and with quite little chil-
dren, or with our grandparents when they came over
to visit us. There was certainly a want of initiation ;
in our house there was no one to suggest all sorts
of delightful possibilities, which, as we grew up,
might have been made more of; but looking back
I chiefly regret it in so far as I think he might have
been happier if we had brought a little more action
and sunshine into daily life, and taken a little more
on our own responsibility instead of making our-
selves into his shadows.
When my father had done his day's work he
liked a change of scene and thought. I think he
was always glad to leave the ink-blots for his be-
loved dabs of paint. Sometimes he used to drive
into town on the top of an omnibus, sometimes in a
brougham ; very often he used to take us with him
in hansoms (which we much preferred) on long ex-
peditions to Hampstead, to Richmond, to Green-
wich, or to studios in distant quarters of the town.
90 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
There was Mr. David Roberts's studio; his welcome
was certain, and his sketch-books were an unfail-
ing delight to turn over ; indeed, the drawings were
so accurate, delicate, and suggestive that they used
to make one almost giddy to look at. Once or
twice we went to Mr. Cattermole's, who had a studio
among the Hampstead hills, hidden among ancient
walls and ivy-trees. Mr. Du Maurier was not yet
living there, or I am sure we should have driven
farther up the hill. As life goes on one grudges
that time and chance alone should have separated
people who would have been so happy with each
other. Sometimes we used to go to Sir Edwin
Landseer's beautiful villa in St. John's Wood, and
enjoy his delightful company. Among his many
stories, as he stood painting at his huge canvases,
I remember his once telling us an anecdote of one
of his dogs. He was in the habit of taking it out
every day after his work was over. The dog used
to wait patiently all day long while Sir Edwin was
painting, but he used to come and lie down at his
feet and look up in his face towards five o'clock;
and on one occasion, finding his hints disregarded,
he trotted into the hall and came back with the
painter's hat, which he laid on the floor before him.
Then we always enjoyed going on to the house
of a neighbor of Sir Edwin's, Mr. Charles Leslie,
who dwelt somewhere in that locality with a de-
IN KENSINGTON 91
lightful household. To say nothing of the act-
ual members of that painter's home, there were
others also belonging to it who were certainly all
but alive. I can still see my father standing in
the South Kensington Museum, sympathetic and
laughing before the picture of Sancho Panza, in
which he sits with his ringer to his nose, with that
look of portentous wisdom and absurdity. As for
the charming duchess, whose portrait is also to be
seen, she, or her prototypes, must surely have dwelt
in the painter's own home. Mr. Dickens used to
be at the Leslies' sometimes, and though I cannot
quite account for it, I have a general impression
of fireworks perpetually going off just outside their
windows.
One day that we had come home from one of
these expeditions in a big blue fly, with a bony
horse it was a bright blue fly, with a drab inside
to it, and an old white coachman on the box my
father, after a few words of consultation with the
coachman, drove off again, and shortly afterwards
returning on foot, told us that he had just bought
the whole concern, brougham and horse and har-
ness, and that he had sent Jackson (our driver had
now become Jackson) to be measured for a great-
coat. So henceforward we came and went about in
our own private carriage, which, however, never
lost its original name of "the fly," although Jack-
Q2 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
son's buttons shone resplendent with the Thack-
eray crest, and the horse, too, seemed brushed up
and promoted to be private.
I remember, or I think I remember, driving in
this vehicle to Mr. Frank Stone's studio in Tavi-
stock Square, and how he and my father began
laughing and talking about early days. " Do you
remember that portrait I began to paint of you
over the lady with the guitar?" Mr. Stone said, and
he added that he had the picture still, and, go-
ing into some deep cupboard, he brought out a
cheerful, florid picture of my father as I for one had
never seen him, with thick black hair and a young,
ruddy face. We brought it away with us, and I
have it now, and the lady's red dress still appears in
the background. It is perhaps fortunate that peo-
ple, as a rule, are well and happy, and at their best,
when their portraits are painted. If one looks down
the Academy list year by year, one sees that the
pictures represent gentlemen who have just been
made bishops, or speakers, or governors - general ;
or ladies who are brides in their lovely new clothes
and jewels. Sad folks hide their heads, sick folks
turn them away and are not fit subjects for the
painter's art ; and yet, as I write, I am also con-
scious that facts contradict me, and that there has
been a fine run of late upon nurses and death-bed
scenes in cncral.
IN KENSINGTON 93
The happy hour had not yet come for us when
Mr. Watts came to live in Kensington at Little
Holland House, and built his studios there. This
was in later times, and after we had just passed
beyond the great pinafore age, which sets such a
stamp upon after-life, and to which my recollections
seem chiefly to revert.
He always said that he should like to paint a
picture of my father, but the day for the sitting,
alas, never came. And yet I can imagine what that
picture might have been a portrait, such as some
portraits, with that mysterious reality in them, that
present, which is quite apart from time and dates.
I am sure there was no one among all his friends
whose society my father enjoyed more than he did
that of John Leech, whom he first remembered, so
he has often told us with a smile, a small boy at the
Charterhouse, in a little blue buttoned-up suit, set
up on a form and made to sing " Home, Sweet
Home " to the others crowding round about. Mr.
Leech was anything but a small boy when I remem-
ber him in the old Young Street dining-room, where
De la Pluche was laying the cloth while Mr. Leech
and my father sat talking by the fire. He was very
handsome and tall, and kind and shy, and he spoke
in a husky, melodious voice ; we admired him very
much ; he was always beautifully dressed, and we
used to see him come riding up to the door on nice
94 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
shining horses ; and he generally came to invite us
all to something delightful, to go there or to dine
with him and his wife at Richmond or elsewhere.
My father liked to take us about with him, and I
am surprised, as I think of it, at the great good-nat-
ure of his friends, who used so constantly to include
two inconvenient little girls in the various invita-
tions they sent him. We used to be asked early,
and to arrive at all sorts of unusual times. We used
to lunch with our hosts and spend long afternoons,
and then about dinner-time our father would come
in, and sit smoking after dinner while we waited
with patient ladies up-stairs. Mrs. Brookfield used
to live in Portman Street in those days, and thither
we used to go very frequently, and to Mrs. Proc-
ter's, as well as to various relations' houses, Indian
cousins of my father's coming to town for a sea-
son with their colonels and their families. Time
after time we used to go to the Leeches, who lived
in Brunswick Square. We used to play with the
baby, we used to turn over endless books of pict-
ures, and perhaps go out for a walk with kind Mrs.
Leech, and sometimes (but this happened very
rarely) we used to be taken up to the room where
John Leech himself sat at his drawing-table under
the square of silver paper which softened the light
as it fell upon his blocks. There was his back as he
bent over his work, there were the tables loaded
IN KENSINGTON 95
with picture-books and drawing-blocks, huge blocks,
four times the size of any at home, ready for next
week's Punch ; but our entrance disturbed him (we
instinctively felt how much), and we used to hurry
quickly back to the drawing-books down-stairs, and
go on turning over the pencil sketches. I have some
of them now, those drawings so roughly indicated,
at first so vague, and then by degrees worked upon
and altered and modelled and forced into their life
as it were, obliged to laugh, charmed into kindly
wit ; as I look at them now, I still recognize the
aspect of those by-gone days and places, and I can-
not help thinking how much more interesting to
remember are some of the shabby homes in which
work and beauty and fun are made, than those more
luxurious and elaborate, which dazzle us so much
more at the time, where everything one saw was
only bought. But, after all, the whole secret of life
is made up of the things one makes, and those one
steals, and those one pays for.
My own children turn over Leech's drawings now,
as happily as we ourselves used to do, and it seems
to me sometimes as if they also are at play among
our own old fancies and in our old haunts. There
are the rooms again. There is Mrs. Leech's old
piano like an organ standing bolt upright against
the wall ; there are the brown-holland covers on the
chairs; there is the domestic lamp, looking (as the
9 6
lamps of one's youth used to look) tall and disman-
tled like some gaunt light-house erected upon bare
mahogany rocks. Besides these things, I remember
with real affection a lovely little miniature portrait
of Mrs. Leech, which used to hang upon the wall,
and which was done at the time of her marriage.
It was indeed the sweetest little picture ; and when
I saw her one little granddaughter, Dorothy Gil-
lett, this old favorite picture of my childhood came
into my mind. It may be hallucination, but, al-
though the houses were so ugly in those days, I
still think the people in them looked almost nicer
then than they do now.
Madame Elise was the great oracle of the 'Fif-
ties, and she used to turn out floating, dignified,
squashy beings with close pearly head-dresses and
bonnets, and sloping, spreading draperies. They
are all to be seen in Mr. Leech's pictures still, and
they may be about to come back to life, crinolines
and all, for anything I know to the contrary. But
I hope not; I think this present generation 'of
women is a happier one than that one was. The
characters of the people I remember were certainly
different from the characters of their daughters of
the present, disporting themselves in the golden
Du Maurier age of liberty and out-door life. Mr.
Leech once drew our own green curtains for us in
a little picture of two girls asking a child what it
IN KENSINGTON 97
had for dinner. The child says, " Something that
begins with a S " ; and when asked what that might
be, explains that it was cold beef.
A certain number of writers and designers for
PuiicJt used to dine at Mr. Leech's, coming in with
my father towards the close of the day. I remem-
ber Mr. Tcnniel there, and Mr. Percival Leigh, and
Mr. Shirley Brooks, and Millais in later days, and
an eminent member of a different profession, the
present Dean of Rochester. Sometimes, instead
of dining in Brunswick Square or at the house in
Kensington (to which they afterwards removed),
we used to be taken all away to Richmond, to en-
joy happy hours upon the terrace, and the light of
setting suns.
My father was pleased when some dozen years
later the Leeches came to Kensington, and he was
greatly interested in their pretty old house. Mr.
Leech was pleased too ; and at first he used to
describe with resigned humor what, alas, became
slow torture in the end to his strained nerves
the different noises as they succeeded each other
in what he had expected to find a quiet suburb
of London : the milkman, the carrier, the industri-
ous carpenter, all following in rotation one by one,
from the very earliest morning. But his nerves
were altogether overstrung. I remember hearing
98 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
him once, in far, far back times, tell a little story,
scarcely perhaps worth retelling. He was looking
altogether ill and upset, and he told us that he
had hardly recovered from a little shock the night
before. Coming home late, and as he went up-
stairs, he had been annoyed by hearing the howl-
ing of a dog in a garden at the back of the house.
He did not know that one of his young sisters
had come to see his wife that evening, had been
persuaded to stay for the night, and put to sleep
in the very room into which he no\v turned, throw-
ing up the window to see where the noise came
from. The moon was shining, and happening to
look round he was quite overcome, seeing a fig-
ure lying motionless upon the bed, while the light
poured coldly upon a white marble profile.
I was going along the Kensington Road towards
Palace Green one fine morning, when I met my fa-
ther carefully carrying before him two blue Dutch
china pots, which he had just surreptitiously taken
away out of his own study. " I am going to see
if they won't stand upon Leech's dining-room
chimney-piece," he said. I followed him, hoping,
I am afraid, that they would not stand there, for
we were well used to lament the accustomed disap-
pearance of his pretty ornaments and china dishes.
People may have stared to see him carrying his
china, but that I do not now remember only
IN KENSINGTON 99
this, that he was amused and interested, and that
we found the iron gates open to the court in front,
and the doors of the Leeches' house all wide open,
though the house itself was empty and the family
had not yet arrived. Workmen were coming and
going, busy hammering carpets and making ar-
rangements. We crossed the hall, and then my
father led the way into the pretty, old dining-room,
with its new Turkey carpet and its tall windows
looking to the gardens at the back. " I knew they
would stand there," said he, putting up the two
blue pots on the high narrow ledge ; and there to
my mind they will ever stand.
It was in the Quarterly Review that my father
wrote of Leech's pictures. " While we live we must
laugh," he says.
Do we laugh enough? Our fathers laughed bet-
ter than we do. Is it that we have overeaten of
the fruit of the tree of knowledge ? I cannot say.
The art of design, as practised by the successors
of John Leech who have followed in his steps,
still holds its own delightful sway ; but the kin-
dred arts of action, of oratory, of literature, have,
to some narrow-minded critics, taken most un-
pleasant forms of sincerity. Sometimes I wonder
how the moralist would write of us now, were he
still among us. I don't know how the present will
strike the new generation, when it has grown up
100 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
to look back in turn upon this somewhat compli-
cated phase of civilization. Sheep's clothing is out
of date, and wolf -skins all the fashion now; but
they are imitation wolf-skins. The would-be Lion
affects the Donkey's ears ; the Pharisee is anxious
to be seen in the Publican's society for the good
impression it makes upon his constituency. It is
all very perplexing, and not very edifying to spec-
ulate on. And then I feel that any day, while one
is fumbling and probing and dissecting and split-
ting hairs, some genius such as John Leech silently
appears and touches commonplace things, and lo !
here is a new light upon earth, a new happiness ;
here is another smile in the land. " Can we have
too much of truth and fun and beauty and kind-
ness?" said John Leech's Friend.
TO WEIMAR AND BACK
VII
I SUPPOSE the outer circuit of my own very lim-
ited wanderings must have been reached at the age
of thirteen or thereabouts, when my father took me
and my little sister for the grand tour of Europe.
We had, of course, lived in Paris, and spent our
summers in quiet sunny country places abroad with
our grandparents, but this was to be something
different from anything we had ever known before
at St. Germains or Montmorenci among the don-
keys. Switzerland and Venice and Vienna, Ger-
many and the Rhine ! Our young souls thrilled
with expectation. And yet those early feasts of
life are not unlike the miracle of the loaves and
fishes : the twelve basketfuls that remain in after-
years are certainly even more precious than the
feast itself.
\Ve started one sleety summer morning. My
father was pleased to be off and we were enchanted.
He had bought a gray wide-awake hat for the jour-
ney, and he had a ne\v sketch-book in his pocket,
besides t\vo smaller ones for us, which he produced
as the steamer was starting. We sailed from Lon-
104 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
don Bridge, and the decks were all wet and slippery
as we came on board. We were scatter-brained
little girls, although we looked demure enough in
our mushroom hats and waterproofs. We had also
prepared a travelling trousseau, which consisted of
miscellaneous articles belonging to the fancy-goods
department of things in general, rather than to the
usual outfit of an English gentleman's family. I
was not without some diffidence about my luggage.
I remember a draught-board, a large wooden work-
box, a good many books, paint-boxes, and other
odds and ends ; but I felt that whatever else might
be deficient, our new bonnets would bring us tri-
umphantly out of every crisis. They were alike,
but with a difference of blue and pink wreaths of
acacia, and brilliant in ribbons to match, at a time
when people affected less dazzling colors than they
do now. Of course, these treasures were not for
the Channel and its mischances ; they were care-
fully packed away and guarded by the draught-
boards and work-boxes and the other contents of
our trunk ; and I may as well conclude the episode
at once, for it is not quite without bearing upon
what I am trying to recall. Alas for human ex-
pectations! When the happy moment came at last,
and we had reached foreign parts, and issued out of
the hotel dressed and wreathed and triumphantly
splendid, my father said : " My dear children, go
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 105
back and put those bonnets away in your box, and
don't ever wear them any more ! Why, you would
be mobbed in these places if you walked out alone
with such ribbons !" How the sun shone as he
spoke ! how my heart sank under the acacia- trees !
My sister was eleven years old, and didn't care a
bit ; but at thirteen and fourteen one's clothes be-
gin to strike root. I felt disgraced, beheaded of my
lovely bonnet, utterly crushed, and I turned away
to hide my tears.
Now, there is a passage in the life of Charles
Kingsley which, as I believe, concerned this very
time and journey; and I am amused, as I remember
the tragedy of my bonnet, to think of the different
sacrifices which men and women have to pay to
popular prejudice, casting their head-gear into the
flames just as the people did in the times of Ro-
mola. We had started by the packet-boat from
London Bridge, as I have said, and immediately we
came on board we had been kindly greeted by a
family group already established there an elderly
gentleman in clerical dress, and a lady sitting with
an umbrella in the drizzle of rain and falling smuts
from the funnel. This was the Kingsley family,
consisting of the rector of Chelsea and his wife and
his two sons (Charles Kingsley was the elder of the
two), then going abroad for his health. It will now
be seen that my recollections concern more histor-
106 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
ical head-dresses than our unlucky bonnets asso-
ciations which William Tell himself might not have
disdained. Mr. Kingsley and his brother were wear-
ing brown felt hats with very high and pointed
crowns, and with very broad brims, of a different
shape from my father's commonplace felt. The
hats worn by Mr. Kingsley and his brother were
more like those well - known brims and peaks
which have crowned so many poets' heads since
then.
It was a stormy crossing ; the waves were curling
unpleasantly round about the boat. I sat by Mrs.
Kingsley, miserable, uncomfortable, and watching
in a dazed and hypnotized sort of way the rim of
Charles Kingsley 's wide-awake as it rose and fell
against the horrible horizon. He stood before us,
holding on to some ropes, and the horizon rose and
fell, and the steamer pitched and tossed, and it
seemed as if Time stood still. But we reached
those farther shores at last, and parted from our
companions, and very soon afterwards my father
told us with some amusement of the adventure
which befell Mr. Charles Kingsley and his brother
almost as soon as they landed, and after they had
parted from their parents. They were arrested by
the police, who did not like the shape of their wide-
awakes. I may as well give the story in Mr. Kings-
ley's own words, which I found in his Life, in an ex-
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 107
tract from a letter written immediately after the
event to Mrs. Charles Kingsley at home. He says :
" Here we are at Treves, having been brought there un-
der arrest with a gendarme from the mayor of Gettesburg,
and liberated next morning with much laughter and many
curses from the police here. However, we had the pleasure
of spending a night in prison among fleas and felons, on
the bare floor. The barbarians took our fishing-tackle for
Todt-instrnmenten, and our wide-awakes for Italian hats,
and got it into their addle-pates that we were emissaries
of Mazzini. . . ."
Perhaps I can find some excuse for the " ad-
dle-pates " when I remember that proud and eager
head, and that bearing so full of character and en-
ergy. One can imagine the author of Alton Locke
not finding very great favor with foreign mou-
chards and gendarmes, and suggesting indefinite
terrors and suspicions to their minds.
Fortunately for the lovers of nature, unfortunate-
ly for autobiographers, the dates of the years as they
pass are not written up in big letters on the blue
vaults overhead, though the seasons themselves are
told in turn by the clouds and lights, and by every
waving tree and every country glade. And so,
though one remembers the aspect of things, the
years are apt to get a little shifted at times, and I
cannot quite tell whether it was this year or that
one followin"; in which we found ourselves still in
I08 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
glorious summer weather returning home from dis-
tant places, and coming back by Germany and by
Weimar.
In common with most children, the stories of our
father's youth always delighted and fascinated us,
and we had often heard him speak of his own early
days at college and in Germany, and of his happy
stay at Pumpernickel-Weimar, where he went to
court and saw the great Goethe, and was in love
with the beautiful Amalia von X. And now coming
to Weimar we found ourselves actually alive in his
past somehow, almost living it alongside with him,
just like Gogo in Mr. Du Maurier's story. I sud-
denly find myself walking up the centre of an emp-
ty shady street, and my father is pointing to a row
of shutters on the first floor of a large and comfort-
able-looking house. " That is where Frau von X.
used to live," he said. " How kind she was to us,
and what a pretty girl Amalia was !" And then, a
little farther on, we passed the house in the sunshine
of a plaz in which he told us he himself had lodged
with a friend ; and then we came to the palace, with
the soldiers and sentries looking like toys wound up
from the Burlington Arcade, and going backward
and forward with their spikes in front of their own
striped boxes; and we saw the acacia-trees with
their cropped heads, and the iron gates ; and we
went across the court-yard into the palace and were
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 109
shown the ball - room and the smaller saloons, and
we stood on the shining floors and beheld the clas-
sic spot where for the first and only time in all his
life, I believe, my father had invited the lovely Ama-
lia to \valtz. And then, coming away all absorbed
and delighted with our experiences in living back-
ward, my father suddenly said, " I wonder if old
Weissenborne is still alive? He used to teach me
German." And lo! as he spoke, a tall, thin old man,
in a broad-brimmed straw hat, with a beautiful Pom-
eranian poodle running before him, came stalking
along with a newspaper under his arm. "Good
gracious, that looks like yes, that is Dr. Weissen-
borne. He is hardly changed a bit," said my fa-
ther, stopping short for a moment, and then he,
too, stepped forward quickly with an outstretched
hand, and the old man in turn stopped, stared,
frowned. " I am Thackeray, my name is Thacke-
ray," said my father, eagerly and shyly as was his
way ; and after another stare from the doctor, sud-
denly came a friendly lighting up and exclaiming
and welcoming and hand -shaking and laughing,
while the pretty white dog leaped up and down, as
much interested as we were in the meeting.
" You have grown so gray I did not know you at
first," said the doctor in English. And my father
laughed and said he was a great deal grayer now
than the doctor himself ; then he introduced us to
IIO CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
the old man, who shook us gravely by the finger-tips
with a certain austere friendliness, and once more
he turned again with a happy, kind, grim face to
my father. Yes, he had followed his career with
interest ; he had heard of him from this man and
that man ; he had read one of his books not all.
Why had he never sent any, why had he never come
back before? "You must bring your misses and
all come and breakfast at my lodging," said Dr.
Weissenborne.
" And is this your old dog?" my father asked, af-
ter accepting the doctor's invitation. Dr. Weissen-
borne shook his head. Alas ! the old dog was no
more ; he died two years before. Meanwhile the
young dog was very much there, frisking and career-
ing in cheerful circles round about us. The doctor
and his dog had just been starting for their daily
walk in the woods when they met us, and they
now invited us to accompany them. We called
at the lodging by the way to announce our return
to breakfast, and then started off together for the
park. The park (I am writing of years and years
ago) was a bright, green little wood, with leaves and
twigs and cheerful lights, with small trees not very
thickly planted on the steep slopes, with many nar-
row paths wandering into green depths, and with
seats erected at intervals along the way. On one
of these seats the old professor showed us an
TO WEIMAR AND BACK III
inscription cut deep into the wood with a knife,
" Doctor W. and liis -dog." Who had carved it? He
did not know. But besides this inscription, on ev-
ery one of the benches where Goethe used to rest,
and on every tree which used to shade his head,
was written another inscription, invisible indeed,
and yet which we seemed to read all along the way
" Here Goethe's life was spent ; here he walked,
here he rested ; his feet have passed to and fro
along this narrow pathway. It leads to his garden-
house."
It was lovely summer weather, as I have said, that
weather which used to be so common when one was
young, and which I dare say our children still dis-
cover now, though we cannot always enjoy it. We
came back with our friend the doctor, and break-
fasted with him in his small apartment, in a room
full of books, at a tiny table drawn to an open win-
dow ; then after breakfast we sat in the professor's
garden among the nasturtiums. My sister and I
were given books to read ; they were translations
for the use of students, I remember; and the old
friends smoked together and talked over a hundred
things. Amalia was married and had several chil-
dren ; she was away. Madame von Goethe was still
in Weimar with her sons, and Fraulein von Pog-
wishe, her sister, was also there. " They would be
delighted to see you again," said the professor.
112 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
" We will go together, and leave the young misses
here till our return." But not so ; our father de-
clared we also must be allowed to come. My rec-
ollections (according to the wont of such provoking
things) here begin to fail me, and in the one partic-
ular which is of any interest ; for though we vis-
ited Goethe's old house, I can scarcely remember
it at all, only that the doctor said Madame von
Goethe had moved after Goethe's death. She lived
in a handsome house in the town, with a fine stair-
case running up between straight walls, and lead-
ing into a sort of open hall, where, amid a good
deal of marble and stateliness, stood two little un-
pretending ladies by a big round table piled with
many books and papers. The ladies were Madame
von Goethe and her sister. Dr. Weissenborne went
first and announced an old friend, and then ensued
more welcomings and friendly exclamations and
quick recognitions on both sides, benevolently su-
perintended by our Virgil. "And are you both as
fond of reading novels as ever?" my father asked.
The ladies laughed ; they said " Yes, indeed," and
pointed to a boxful of books which had just arrived,
with several English novels among them, which they
had been unpacking as we came in. Then the sons
of the house were sent for kind and friendly and
unassuming young men, walking in, and as much
interested and pleased to witness their parent's
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 113
pleasure as we were ; not handsome, with nothing
of their grandfather's noble aspect (as one sees it
depicted), but with most charming and courteous
ways. One was a painter, the mother told us, the
other a musician. And while my father talked to
the elder ladies, the young men took us younger
ones in hand. They offered to show us the cele-
brated garden-house, and asked us to drink tea there
next day. And so it happened that once more we
found ourselves being conducted through the little
shady wood. But to be walking there with Goethe's
family, with his grandsons and their mother, the
Ottilie who had held the dying poet's hand to the
last ; to be going to his favorite resort where so
much of his time was spent ; to hear him so fa-
miliarly quoted and spoken of, was something like
hearing a distant echo of the great voice itself ;
something like seeing the skirts of his dressing-gown
just waving before us. And at the age I was then
impressions are so vivid that I have always all my
life had a vague feeling of having been in Goethe's
presence. We seemed to find something of it every-
where, most of all in the little garden-house, in the
bare and simple room where he used to write. One
of the kind young men went to the window and
showed us something on the pane. What it was
I know not clearly, but I think it was his name
written with a diamond ; and finally, in the garden,
114 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
at a wooden table, among trees and dancing shad-
ows, we drank our tea, and I remember Wolfgang
von Goethe handing a teacup, and the look of it,
and suddenly the whole thing vanishes. . . . There
was a certain simple dignity and hospitality in it all
which seems to belong to all the traditions of hos-
pitable Weimar, and my father's pleasure and hap-
py emotion gave a value and importance to every
tiny detail of that short but happy time. Even the
people at the inn remembered him, and came out
to greet him ; but they sent in such an enormous
bill as we were departing on the evening of the
second day that he exclaimed in dismay to the
waiter, " So much for sentimental recollections !
Tell the host I shall never be able to afford to
come back to Weimar again."
The waiter stared ; I wonder if he delivered the
message. The hotel - bill I have just mentioned
was a real disappointment to my father, and, alas
for disillusions ! another more serious shock, a meet-
ing which was no meeting, somewhat dashed the
remembrance of Amalia von X.
It happened at Venice, a year or two after our
visit to Weimar. We were breakfasting at a long
table where a fat lady also sat a little way off, with
a pale fat little boy beside her. She was stout; she
was dressed in light green ; she was silent ; she was
eating an egg. The sala of the great marble hotel
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 115
was shaded from the blaze of sunshine, but stray
gleams shot across the dim hall, falling on the
palms and the orange-trees beyond the lady, who
gravely shifted her place as the sunlight dazzled
her. Our own meal was also spread, and my sister
and I were only waiting for my father to begin.
He came in presently, saying he had been looking
at the guest -book in the outer hall, and he had
seen a name which had interested him very much.
" Frau von Z. Geboren von X. It must be Amalia !
She must be Iicre in the hotel," he said ; and as
he spoke he asked a waiter whether Madame von
Z. was still in the hotel. " I believe that is Madame
von Z.," said the waiter, pointing to the fat lady.
The lady looked up and then went on with her
egg, and my poor father turned away, saying in a
low, overwhelmed voice, " That Amalia ! That can-
not be Amalia." I could not understand his silence,
his discomposure. " Aren't you going to speak to
her? Oh, please do go and speak to her !" we both
cried. " Do make sure if it is Amalia." But he
shook his head. " I can't," he said ; " I had rather
not." Amalia meanwhile, having finished her egg,
rose deliberately, put down her napkin and walked
away, followed by her little boy.
Things don't happen altogether at the same time ;
they don't quite begin or end all at once. Once
more I heard of Amalia long years afterwards,
Il6 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
when by a happy hospitable chance I met Dr.
Norman MacLeod at the house of my old friends,
Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe. I was looking at him, and
thinking that in some indefinable way he put me
in mind of the past, when he suddenly asked me if
I knew that he and my father had been together
as boys at Weimar, learning German from the same
professor, and both in love with the same beautiful
girl. " What, Amalia? Dr. Weissenborne?" I cried.
" Dear me! do you know about Amalia?" said Dr.
MacLeod, " and do you know about old Weissen-
borne ? I thought I was the only person left to
remember them. We all learned from Weissen-
borne, we were all in love with Amalia, every one
of us, your father too ! What happy days those
were !" And then he went on to tell us that years
and years afterwards, when they met again on the
occasion of one of the lecturing tours in Scotland,
he, Dr. MacLeod, and the rest of the notabilities
were all assembled to receive the lecturer on the
platform, and as my father came by carrying his'
papers and advancing to take his place at the
reading-desk, he recognized Dr. MacLeod as he
passed, and in the face of all the audience he bent
forward and said, gravely, without stopping one
moment on his way, " Ich licbc Amalia docJi" and
so went on to deliver his lecture.
Dr. MacLeod also met Amalia once again in
TO WEIMAR AND BACK 117
after-life, and to him, too, had come a disillusion.
He, too, had been overwhelmed and shocked by
the change of years. Poor lady ! I can't help be-
ing very sorry for her ; to have had two such
friends and not to have kept them seems a cruel
fate. To have been so charming, that her present
seemed but a calumny upon the past. It is like
the story of the woman who flew into a fury with
her own portrait, young, smiling, and triumphant,
and who destroyed it, so as not to be taunted by
the past any more. Let us hope that Frau von Z.
was never conscious of her loss, never looked upon
this picture and on that.
Since writing all this, I have found an old letter
from my father to his mother, and written from
Weimar. It is dated 2Qth September, 1830. "There
is a capital library here," he says, "which is open to
me, an excellent theatre which costs a shilling a
night, and a charming petite socicte which costs
nothing. Goethe, the great lion of Weimar, I have
not yet seen, but his daughter-in-law has promised
to introduce me." Then he describes going to
court : " I have had to air my legs in black breech-
es and to sport a black coat, black waistcoat, and
cock-hat, looking something like a cross between a
footman and a Methodist parson.
" We have had three operas," he goes on; " 'Me-
Il8 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
dea ' and the ' Barber of Seville ' and the ' Flauto
Magico.' Hummel conducts the orchestra [then
comes a sketch of Hummel with huge shirt-collar].
The orchestra is excellent, but the singers are not
first-rate." . . . Amalia must have had rivals, even
in those early days, for this same letter goes on
to say : " I have fallen in love with the Princess of
Weimar, who is unluckily married to Prince Charles
of Prussia. I must get over this unfortunate pas-
sion, which will otherwise, I fear, bring me to an
untimely end. There are several very charming
young persons of the female sex here ; Miss Amalia
von X. and ditto von Pappenheim are the evening
belles."
" Of winter nights," says my father in the other
well-known letter which is printed in Lewes's Life
of Goethe, "we used to charter sedan-chairs in
which we were carried through the snow to those
pleasant court entertainments. I for my part was
fortunate enough to purchase Schiller's sword,
which formed a part of my court costume and still
hangs in my study,* and puts me in mind of days
of youth the most kindly and delightful."
* So he wrote in 1855, but a few years after he gave the sword to
a friend for whom he had a great affection, who carried it back to
America as a token of good-will and sympathy. This friend was
Hayard Taylor, a true knight, and worthy to carry the honorable
bloodless weapon.
VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA
VIII
ONE day Jackson drove the blue fly up to the
door, and my father, looking rather smart, with a
packet of papers in his hand, and my grandmother,
who had come over from Paris, and my sister and
I all got in, and we drove away, a nervous com-
pany, to Willis's Rooms to hear the first of the
lectures upon the English Humorists. My father
was of course very nervous, but as we drove along
he made little jokes to reassure us all ; then to-
gether we mounted the carpeted staircase leading
to the long, empty room, and after a time he left
us. I have no very pleasant recollection of that
particular half -hour of my life. I remember the
unoccupied chairs, and people coming in rather
subdued, as if into a church. Many of the win-
dows were open, the sky looked very blue over the
roof-tops, our hearts were thumping, the carriages
outside came driving up with distant rumbling
sounds growing louder and louder ; and I remem-
ber wondering at the time whether I should mind
very much if the day of judgment could suddenly
come upon us and thus put an end to this terrible
122 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
ordeal, which desperate imagination was a real con-
solation to me at the moment. It is a happiness
to realize now who it was who came to my dear
father's help when all our emotion and sympathy
was, I fear, only a hinderance. I cannot help giv-
ing the passage out of Mrs. Kemble's records con-
cerning my father's lectures, although it may have
already been quoted by others.
" I met Thackeray at Miss Perry's at dinner, a few days
before he began his course of lectures on the English Hu-
morists, and he asked me to come and hear him, and told
me he was so nervous about it that he was afraid he should
break down. . . .
" He was to lecture at Willis's Rooms, in the same room
where I read ; and going thither before the time for his be-
ginning I found him standing like a forlorn, disconsolate
giant in the middle of the room, gazing about him. 'O
Lord !' he exclaimed, as he shook hands with me, ' I'm sick
at my stomach with fright !' I spoke some words of en-
couragement to him and was going away, but he held my
hand like a scared child, crying, ' Oh, don't leave me !'
' But,' said I, ' Thackeray, you mustn't stand here. Your
audience are beginning to come in ' ; and I drew him from
the middle of the chairs and benches, which were begin-
ning to be occupied, into the retiring-room adjoining the
lecture-room, my own reading having made me perfectly
familiar with both. 'Oh,' he said, ' if I could only get at
that confounded thing [his lecture], to have a last look at
it !' 'Where is it?' said I. 'Oh, in the next room on the
reading-desk.' 'Well,' said I, 'if you don't like to go in
VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 123
and get it, I'll fetch it for you.' And remembering well
the position of my reading-table, which had been close to
the door of the retiring-room, I darted in, hoping to snatch
the manuscript without attracting the attention of the au-
dience, with which the room was already nearly full. I had
been used to deliver my readings seated at a very low ta-
ble, but my friend Thackeray gave his lectures standing,
and had had a reading-desk placed on the platform, adapt-
ed to his own very tall stature, so that when I came to
get his manuscript it was almost above my head. Though
rather disconcerted, I was determined not to go back with-
out it, and so made a half-jump and a clutch at the book,
when every leaf of it (they were not fastened together)
came fluttering separately down about me. I hardly know
what I did, but I think I must have gone nearly on all-fours
in my agony to gather up the scattered leaves, and retreat-
ing with them, held them out in dismay to poor Thack-
eray, crying, ' Oh, look, look what a dreadful thing I have
done!' ' My dear soul,' said he, 'you couldn't have done
better for me. I have just a quarter of an hour to wait
here, and it will take me about that to page this again, and
it's the best thing in the world that could have happened."'
And so while my father was paging the manu-
script, and we were waiting outside, the people
kept coming in more and more quickly and filling
up the places in front of us, behind us, all round
us, settling down, unfastening their wraps, nodding
to each other. I was gazing at a lady who had
taken off her bonnet and sat in a little Quaker cap
just in front of me, when suddenly, there stood my
124 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
father facing this great roomful. Though we had
been waiting all the time, he came sooner than we
expected. His voice sounded strained and odd for
an instant, and I didn't recognize it. " In treating
of the English humorists of the eighteenth century,
it is of the men rather than of their works," so the
strange voice began, and then almost immediately
it softened and deepened and became his own, and
at the same time as he stood there I realized that
he looked just like himself : there was his waist-
coat and his watch-chain, and my vague youthful
spinnings and chokings and confusions began to
subside.
I was now glad the day of judgment hadn't come.
I don't remember taking in one word after the first
sentence, but sat staring and taking breath, and
realizing somehow that all was going well. Among
other things I did notice, and do remember, the
proud and happy look of light and relief in my
grandmother's face, and her beautiful gray eyes all
shining, when the people applauded, and the lect-
ure was all over just as unexpectedly as it had
begun, and the lady in the Quaker cap tied her
bonnet on again, and somebody said she was the
Duchess of Sutherland, and the people were all
talking and crowding up and shaking hands with
the lecturer. Then came the happy drive home ;
Jackson made the horse gallop, and my father
VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 125
laughed and made real jokes without any effort,
and we laughed and enjoyed every jolt and turn-
ing on the way home this time.
These lectures gradually became a part of our ev-
ery-day life, just as much as the books and the arti-
cles my father used to write, and the little printers'
boys waiting and swinging their legs in the hall.
Young men's institutes and provincial agencies
used to invite him to the north and to the south.
He came and he went ; sometimes he read in the
suburbs or at friends' houses, at Mrs. Procter's and
elsewhere ; once he read at home, at the request, I
think, of his well-loved Mrs. Elliot and Miss Perry.
Sometimes he took us with him when he was not
going very far from home. To this day I can en-
joy that glorious summer's day we first spent at
Oxford among the gardens and the gables, and
where, with our host St. John Thackeray, AVC stood
in the street outside watching the backs of the au-
dience pressing in to hear the lecture.
One year my father told us that he was going
away he was going to America to give his lect-
ures there ; he was going as soon as he had fin-
ished the book upon which he was engaged, and
we were to spend the winter in Paris during his
absence. " I must replace my patrimony," he said,
"and make some provision for your mother and for
you, and you must go to my mother's and spend
126 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
the winter with her ; you must work as hard as
you can while I am away, and consider yourselves
at college in a fashion, and learn French and a lit-
tle music to play me to sleep of an evening when
I come home." Alas! we neither of us could ever
make enough music to send him to sleep, though
I have often sent him out of the room. My hair
used to stand on end, my fingers used to turn to
stone when I tried to play to him ; even the things
I liked best seemed to go off the rails in some gen-
eral catastrophe.
America was farther away then than it is now,
when a thousand Columbuses or Columbi (what-
ever the plural may be) cross the ocean week by
week with a parting nod and a return ticket. That
whole summer of 1854 seemed darkened by the
coming separation. It was a long and burning
summer ; even the shadows seemed burned up, and
so were the gardens at the back of the houses, and
the brown turf and the avenues of Kensington Gar-
dens, those gardens where that strange mist which
is not quite fog nor quite real nor even a fancy,
but which has always seemed to me to be the very
spirit of London itself, comes rising along the
straight and formal distances. My father was hard
at work finishing a book which some people still
say is the best of all his books. People read it
then, when it came out, and read it still and re-
VIA WILLIS S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 127
read it. He used to write in his study with the
vine shading the two windows, and we used to do
our lessons, or sit sewing and reading in the front
room with the bow-window to the street ; and one
day, as we were there with our governess, my fa-
ther came in in great excitement. " There's a
young fellow just come," said he ; " he has brought
a thousand pounds in his pocket ; he has made me
an offer for my book ; it's the most spirited, hand-
some offer ; I scarcely like to take him at his word ;
he's hardly more than a boy ; his name is George
Smith ; he is waiting there now, and I must go
o o
back ;" and then, after walking once up and down
the room, my father went away, and for the first
time, a lifetime ago, I heard the name of this good
friend-to-be.
A great many arrangements were made for the
coming year's absence ; there was a talk of letting
the house, but it was only shut up with a couple
of old servants to keep it. My father's servants
rarely left him. His old publishers gave him a sil-
ver punch-bowl, and his new publisher (I am writ-
ing of nearly half a century ago) gave him a beau-
tiful despatch-box ; and this same good friend gave
to my sister and to me a noble drawing of our fa-
ther's head, by Samuel Lawrence, to look at while
he was away. Then we all set off and went abroad
to rejoin our grandmother and grandfather, and for
128 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
a little while we travelled together, and then my
father had to leave us. I can see him now as he
stood beside a wooden column at some railway
junction Olten, I think it was and he stooped to
kiss us ; and then he put us into our railway car-
riage, and we were carried off with heavy hearts
while he stood looking at us fixedly, tall and
straight, and the train scudded off. Somehow we
never got used to these partings, though our father
returned each time safe and in good spirits, and
pleased with his journey and its results.
People can still walk through Kensington Square
and look up at the house, yet standing with its win-
dows facing westward, in which Rachel Castlewood
once dwelt, and where Colonel Esmond came, and
where the Pretender also came in his blond peri-
wig and blue ribbon, and threw away so Colonel
Esmond tells us a kingdom for a passing fancy.
In so looking they may well people the past with
figures all touched with its color, and yet so strange-
ly living still that as one reads one seems to have
known them all. But any one who may try to fol-
low the familiar shades out of the precincts of Ken-
sington Square and beyond Young Street, where
the porters with the chairs must have passed, into
the high-road which leads to London, must be im-
aginative indeed to conjure up their remembrance
any more. The King's Arms, where the conspira-
VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 129
tors were assembled when King George was pro-
claimed, has vanished out of sight ; its quiet gar-
dens are piled up high with bricks and stories rear-
ing like a new Babel to the sky. There are cities
spreading where the market-gardens were flowering
but yesterday, tram-cars passing, engines whistling.
I can scarcely imagine my father himself writing
Esmond in such a chaos. Novels of the future will
take place by telegram, in flats, in lifts, in metro-
politan railways they will whirl, Ixion-like, on per-
petual bicycles and wheels. It is difficult to imag-
ine devotion such as Esmond's continuing in this
present sequence of events; it seems as if new im-
pulses, both physical and mental, must arise in such
a multiplicity of impressions ; as if a new race must
people the earth. Beatrice, indeed, might belong to
these latter times ; but Esmond and Lady Castle-
wood would seem strangely out of place. *
* Some one has given me a map of Kensington in 1764, by which
one can see what lanes and green fields and gardens still lay be-
tween the village and London, more than a mile away. Nursery
gardens, wide open spaces, brick kilns on Campclen Hill, and gravel
pits. In the midst of green fields stood three or four houses called
" Bays Watering." The Serpentine was called the New River,
Kensington Gore consisted of rive houses. Ilogmore Lane and
Lobb's Field ran from the high-road towards Chelsea. Though I
have the map before me, I can hardly feel that it was ever true, and
yet I remember Hogmore Lane. And there was Love Lane beyond,
along which \ve used to go for straggling walks with our playfellows
the Coles, who lived in the Terrace close by. We used to start about
six o'clock on summer mornings, and come home with branches of
hawthorn flowers to decorate our school-room and to remind our-
selves that it was May-time.
9
130 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
There is one part of London which, however, still
seems to me little changed since then, and that is
Cheyne Row, which used to be at the end of all these
hawthorn lanes, by the onward course of fashion
and events ; and that is Chelsea, whither we used
often to be sent as children, crossing the lanes and
fields, and coming by a pond and a narrow street
called Paradise Row into the King's Road, and
then after a few minutes' walk to Cheyne Row,
where Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle lived to the end of
their lives, and which seems to all of us made living
still by their dead footsteps.
The old house in Cheyne Row is one of the first
things I can remember when we came to London.
Its stillness, its dimness, its panelled walls, its carved
balusters, ancl the quiet garden behind, where at
intervals in the brickwork lay the tobacco-pipes all
ready for use ; little Nero, the doggie, in his little
coat, barking and trembling in every limb it all
comes before one with so much clearness that, al-
though so much has been said about that home, I
cannot omit all mention of a place which made so
vivid a part of my early life.
In the dining-room stood that enchanting screen
covered with pictures, drawings, prints, fashions,
portraits without end, which my father liked so
much; up-stairs was the panelled drawing-room
with its windows to the Row, and the portrait of
VIA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 131
Oliver Cromwell hanging opposite the windows.
But best of all, there was Mrs. Carlyle herself, a
living picture ; Gainsborough should have been
alive to paint her: slim, bright, upright, in her
place. She looked like one of the grand ladies our
father used sometimes to take us to call upon. She
used to be handsomely dressed in velvet and point
lace. She sat there at leisure and prepared for con-
versation. She was not familiar, but cordial, digni-
fied, interested in everything as she sat installed in
her corner of the sofa by one of the little tables cov-
ered with knick-knacks of silver and mother-of-pearl.
Almost the first time we ever went to see her
we had walked to Chelsea through the snow, and
across those lanes which have now become South
Kensington, and when we arrived, numb and chilled
and tired, we found in the dining-room below, stand-
ing before the fire, two delicious hot cups of choco-
late already prepared for us, with saucers placed
upon the top. " I thought ye would be frozen," said
she, and the hot chocolate became a sort of institu-
tion. Again and again she has sat by, benevolent
and spirited, superintending our wintry feasts, in-
viting our confidences, confiding in us to a certain
degree.
She used to tell us many of the stories which
have since come into print. She was never weary
of discoursing of "Carlyle," of his genius, his dys-
132 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
pepsia, of quoting his sayings. "If you wish for a
quiet life," she used to say, " never you marry a
dyspeptic man of genius." I remember she used
to tell us, when he first grew a beard, how all the
time he had saved by ceasing to shave he spent
wandering about the house, and bemoaning that
which was amiss in the universe. As children we
did not have much of Carlyle's company; if he
came in and sat down in the arm-chair, which was
his on the opposite side to the sofa, we immediately
went away ; but the sense of his presence overhead
in the study distinctly added to our enjoyment so
long as he remained up-stairs. Mrs. Carlyle used
to tell us of her early life, of her love for study.
Many of her admonitions and friendly warnings
have remained in my memory. Once, looking ex-
pressively at me with her dark eyes, she began to
speak of self-control. " We have all," she said, " a
great deal more power over our minds than it is at
all the fashion to allow, and an infinity of resource
and ability to use it. There was a time in my own
life," she said, " when I felt that unless I strove
against the feeling with all my strength and might
I should be crazed outright. I passed through that
time safely; I was able to fight it out, and not to
let myself go. People can help themselves, that I
am convinced of, and that fact is not nearly enough
dwelt upon."
VIA WILLIS S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 133
One day we went there; we were no longer chil-
dren. I was a grown young lady, keeping a diary
at the time, in which I find the following record of
a brown-paper parcel : " To Mrs. Carlyle's, where
we found Lady Stanley of Alderley just leaving the
room; then Mrs. Carlyle, taking up the talk again,
immediately began speaking enthusiastically about
Adam Bedc, which had just come out. She had
written to the author, she said ; she had received
grateful messages from her in reply. She said that
Mr. Carlyle quite declined reading the book, and
when she expressed a hope that it might be sent to
her, ' What should she send it to you for ?' he said.
'Why shouldn't she send it?' she answered; 'she
sent me the first.' ' You are just like all weemen,'
said he. (Mrs. Carlyle always says weemen.) 'You
are always forming unreasonable expectations.' "
We were going away, for we heard a ring at the
bell, which seemed to betoken fresh visitors. Then
the door opened, and in came, not visitors, but
Charly the maid, carrying an unmistakable pub-
lisher's brown-paper parcel. Mr. Carlyle, who had
followed her in, came and sat down upon the sofa.
Mrs. Carlyle exclaimed and started forward. We
opened our eyes in delighted partisanship ; the string
was cut, and there, sure enough, were the three
orange volumes of Adam Bede, sent with the au-
thor's compliments.
134 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS,
Here are two notes addressed to my father in the
philosopher's handsome cramped handwriting :
"Chelsea, 24th May, 1860.
" Alas, dear Thackeray, I durst as soon undertake to dance
a hornpipe on the top of Bond Steeple as to eat a white-
bait dinner in my present low and lost state ! Never in my
life was I at such a pass. You are a good brother man ;
and I am grateful. Pray for me, and still hope for me if
you can.
" Yours ever,
"T. CARLYLE."
"Chelsea, 26th May, 1860.
" DEAR THACKERAY, The thing I contemplated just now
(or the nucleus of the thing) was a letter concerning that
anecdote about Fontenoy, ' Faites feu, j\fessiciirs,' on the
part of the English, with answer from the Gardes Fran-
Daises, 'Begin you, gentlemen; wouldn't do such a thing
for the world !' My letter is from Lord Charles Hay, Cap-
tain of the Scots Fusiliers, main actor in the business; it
was sent me last year by Lord Gifford ; and I could have
made a little story out of it which would have been worth
publishing.
" But on applying to Lord Gifford, he (what he is himself,
I believe, truly sorry for) cannot at present give me per-
mission. So the poor little enterprise falls to nothing
again ; and I may be said to be in a state of ill-luck just
now !
" If I ever in the end of this book have life left, you shall
have plenty of things. But for the time being I can only
answer de proftindis to the above effect.
" Fair wind and full sea to vou in this hitherto so success-
VIA WILLIS S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 135
ful voyage, for which the omens certainly are on all sides
good. Your people do not send me a copy (since No. I.) ;
but we always draw our purse upon it to the small extent
requisite.
" Yours ever truly,
"T. CARLYLE."
These notes were written when the CornJiill was
first started, an eventful time in our lives.
Some voices are those which speak to us; others
speak for us. The first belong to the immortals
who dwell apart somewhere beyond the boundaries
of common life and moods, and it is, perhaps, for
that very reason they are best able to give utter-
ance to oracles ; the others belong to humanity
itself, and among these latter voices, who would
not reckon Carlyle's ?
" I wish you could get Carlyle's miscellaneous
criticisms," wrote my father in 1839, m a letter to
his mother. " I have read a little in the book. A
nobler one does not live in our language, I am sure,
and one that will have such an effect on our ways
of thought and prejudices. Criticism has been a
party matter with us till now, and literature is a
poor political lacquey. Please God we shall begin,
ere long, to love art for art's sake. It is Carlyle
who has worked more than any other to give it its
independence."
I went out with my father one evening in the
136 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
winter of 1863, and as we were driving along in the
dusk by the Serpentine we passed Carlyle walking
across the park, and my father, seeing him, leaned
forward and waved his hands. " A great, benevo-
lent shower of salutations," Carlyle called it, when
he spoke in after-days of this last meeting.
After Mrs. Carlyle's death, it was Carlyle that we
used to go and see in the old drawing-room, which
he took to inhabiting altogether. It was no sur-
prise, when his history was told, to realize that he
had been sometimes cross and often contrary ; but
that passion of tender love and remorse and devo-
tion came as a revelation all the more moving that
one had almost guessed it at times. It was when
my own father died that something was revealed to
us of his deep and tender feeling.
After Carlyle himself was laid to rest I went for
the last time to look at the house which I remem-
bered all my life ; my little boy was with me, and
he began crowing and pointing to the old screen
full of pictures, some of which his grandfather had
drawn. It still stood in its place in the dining-room.
From behind the old screen came Mrs. Alexander
Carlyle, carrying her little Tom, who, seeing a fel-
low-baby, uttered three deep notes, and in them
was some strange echo of the familiar voice that
had filled the house so long, and reached how far
beyond its walls !
VIA WILLIS S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 137
P.S. It will be remembered in Lewes's Life of
GoctJic there is an account of a birthday gift sent by
fifteen Englishmen to Goethe. " The young Car-
lyle, who had been cheered through his struggling
sadness and strengthened for the part he was to
play in life by the beauty and the wisdom which
Goethe had revealed to him, conceived the idea
that it would be a pleasant and a fitting thing if
some of the few admirers of Goethe in England
forwarded to Weimar a trifling token of their ad-
miration. On reaching home Mrs. Carlyle at once
sketched the design of a seal to be engraved, the
Serpent of Eternity encircling a star, with the
words. ' Ohne Rast, ohne Hast " (Unhasting, un-
resting), in allusion to the well-known verses,
" ' Like a star unliasting, unresting be each one fulfilling his God-
given hest.' "
It was the remembrance of this little incident
which suggested long years afterwards another
small presentation at a time when Carlyle was liv-
ing in Cheyne Row with his niece. There had been
some alarm of house-breakers in Chelsea, which sac-
rilegious house-breakers, not content with robbing
ordinary people, broke into Mr. Carlyle's house and
ran away again without carrying off anything more
valuable than a dining-room clock. It was, as I
say, the remembrance of the little incident of the
138 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
seal which suggested to some one the idea of re-
placing the stolen clock, and about fifteen of Car-
lyle's friends and admirers subscribed to purchase
one, a small sign of their respect and good -will.
Among the subscribers were his old friends Lady
Stanley of Alderley, Lady Airlie, Mrs. Oliphant,
and Mr. Lecky. Lady Stanley was asked to be
spokeswoman on the occasion, and to present the
little gift. It was Carlyle's birthday, and a dismal
winter's day;* the streets were shrouded in greenish
vapors, and the houses looked no less dreary with-
in than the streets through which we had come.
Somewhat chilled and depressed, we all assembled
in Lady Stanley's great drawing-room in Dover
Street, where the fog had also penetrated, and pres-
ently from the farther end of the room, advancing
through the darkness, came Carlyle. There was a
moment's pause. No one moved. He stood in the
middle of the room without speaking. No doubt
the philosopher as well as his disciples felt the in-
fluence of the atmosphere. Lady Stanley went to
meet him. " Here is a little birthday present we
want you to accept from us all, Mr. Carlyle," said
she, quickly pushing up before him a small table
upon which stood the clock ticking all ready for his
acceptance. Then came another silence, broken by a
knell, sadly sounding in our ears. " Eh, what have I
* 4th December, 1794.
flA WILLIS S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 139
got to do with Time any more," he said. It was a
melancholy moment. Nobody could speak. The
unfortunate promoter of the scheme felt her heart
sinking into her shoes. Had she but had the wit
to answer him cheerfully, to assure him that any-
how Time had a great deal to do with him, the lit-
tle ceremony might have been less of a fiasco than
it assuredly was ; and yet I think afterwards the old
man must have been pleased, and liked to think he
was remembered. Few people could value sincer-
ity as he did, or better know the worth of love and
affectionate respect.
IN V1LLEGGIATURA
IX
I HAVE already mentioned my father's tour in
America when he went to deliver those lectures
which had been so successful in England. Saying
good-bye is the price one has to pay even for a
prosperous and fortunate expedition. I can still
see him as he stood on the platform of the raihvay
station at Olten, in Belgium, where we parted. He
stood by a slender iron column, looking very tall
and very sad as he watched the train go off in
which we were bound for Switzerland with our
grandparents. He himself was returning to Eng-
land through Germany. He had to correct the
proofs of Esmond before he left, and to give some
more lectures in the provinces, and to wind up
things at home.
My grandmother was very miserable and nervous.
She had brought him a life-belt for his cabin as a
farewell gift, and thoroughly frightened herself by
so doing. \Ve were too young to be nervous, but
we were very unhappy. Our dear old grandfather
did his best to cheer us all, and after we had parted
from my father he made out all sorts of pleasant
144 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
little plans, and ordered various special compotes
and tartlets at the hotels suited to our youthful ap-
petites. He took us for walks and to visit muse-
ums, and he always consulted any fellow-travellers
and sight-seers as to our next movements. Indeed,
our journeyings greatly depended upon these chance
encounters and recommendations. The first night,
when we put up at some little inn, the waiter
brought us the traveller's book to write our names
in ; I forget all about the place, but I can see the
book and the table -spread, and what I do most
vividly remember is our despair when, instead of
the neat Mr. Thackeray and family, to which we
were used, we read the following announcement in
our grandfather's handwriting: " Sclimid Major, en
retraitc, avcc Madame sa c'pouse et scs deux Made-
moiselles." My grandmother, sad as she was, began
to laugh, and we all entreated our dear old major
to make some changes in the inscription, but he
stuck to it, and would not alter a single letter.
We reached Geneva after some days. There at
the postc rcstantc we found various letters waiting,
and news of our father. "As for the arrival at this
place [he was writing from Salzburg], it's like enter-
ing into fairyland, it is so beautiful; and the Tyrol
is delightful too, but not like our Switzerland.
And one Swiss cottage is uncommonly like another,
and with five or six days of rocks and pinewoods I
IN VILLEGGIATURA 145
feel somehow as if I've had enough !" Then a little
further on he writes: " Give my love to my dearest
mother, and have her to understand that this blue
devil of which I complain is only an artistic blue
devil, and that he comes always before I get to
work, and that there is no other reason. . . . There
is bad music here, for a wonder, at the beer garden ;
though I amused myself very well there yesterday,
opposite a pretty little child of three years, who
ate three sausages with her fingers and without any
bread, all except a little bit which she gave out of
her mouth to her mamma. And I went up a hill to
a Capuchin convent and saw some of my favorite
dirty scoundrels with beards, and the town clinks
all over with Austrian sabres."
I never think of^ Geneva and of those particular
days without a curious feeling of terror and emo-
tion. We were in a tall hotel, with windows looking
towards the lake, and it was lovely summer weather,
but it was a dismal time. My dear grandmother
sought for sympathy among the people to whom she
was naturally drawn, the masters and teachers be-
longing to the Protestant Church in Geneva. They
were interesting and important personages, who in-
spired me with a curious mixture of respect and
discomfort, and to whom my grandmother had
brought various introductions from her friends the
French Protestant past curs at Paris.
146 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
There was a garden to which she took me, not
far from our hotel, with beautiful shady trees and
spreading grass. In the garden stood a white
chapel clean, light, bare, decorous, with some black
and white marble ornamentations. A woman in a
black frilled cap showed us to our seats, and there
we waited, listening for some time to a clanging
bell. Then the service began. Only one or two
people came to it, but the place, although to others
it might speak of most fervent and passionate emo-
tion, seemed oppressive with chill and silent religion
to me. When all was over, my grandmother had
some low-voiced conversation with the woman in
the black cap, who beckoned to the bell-ringer, and
the result of the whispering was that, after a short
delay, we were led across the grass and under the
trees to a retired part of the garden, where in the
shade of some bushes sat an old man of very noble
aspect, with long white hair falling on his shoulders.
He looked to me like some superior being. Indeed,
to my excited imagination it seemed as if I were
being brought up to the feet of a prophet, to some
inspired person who was sitting there in authority
and in judgment on all the rest of the world. This
old man was M. Cesar Malan, the head of a section
of the Calvinist Church in Geneva, whose name was
well known and very widely respected. He had
built the chapel in his garden. Not a little to my
IN VILLEGGIATURA 147
consternation, after a few words with my grand-
mother, he immediately, with the utmost kindness,
began asking me questions about myself, about my
convictions, my religious impressions, my hopes,
my future aspirations. He was very kind, but even
an angel from heaven would be alarming, suddenly
appearing to a girl of fifteen with such a catechism.
The more kindly he pressed me, the less able I was
to answer. Sometimes I said too much, sometimes
I was hopelessly silent, and in the midst of a ner-
vous discussion as to the ultimate fate of Judas
(I felt somewhat akin to him myself) the scene
ended in my bursting into tears of embarrassment
and hopeless confusion. I was consoled on our re-
turn to the hotel by my grandfather, who was most
sympathetic. "Those, my dear child," he said,
" who have studied deeply, who are able to read
the Scriptures in the original, are far more likely
than you or I to be able to judge correctly upon
such important subjects, and we had therefore
better leave all such speculations entirely to them."
That next winter, which we spent in Paris, we
used to attend the classes of a man even better
known than Cesar Malan Adolphe Monod, who
remains to me one of the most striking and noble
figures I have ever met; his face, his dark eyes, all
spoke as well as his eloquent voice, and, above all,
his earnest life and ways. To me he seemed the
148 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
St. Paul of my own time; and those classes which
cost so many tears, and which gave rise to so much
agitated discussion, are still among the most touch-
ing and heart-reaching experiences of my life. I
can see the girls' faces now, as they listened to
their beloved pastcnr. Our hearts were in our
lessons, as his was in his teaching, undoubtedly;
we were all in earnest and ready to follow; only,
though I longed to be convinced, I could only ad-
mire and love the lesson and the teacher as well.
He warned, encouraged, explained in his earnest,
gentle voice. "Ah, mes enfants," I can hear him
saying, " fuyez, fuyez ce monde !" Fly the world !
If ever the world was delightful and full of interest
it was then the daily task, the hour and its inci-
dents eventful and absorbing ; if ever our hearts
were open to receive, not to reject, it was then.
M. Monod himself was no unimportant factor in my
world. I once saw Faraday, who reminded me of
him. The pastcnr had come to see my grandmoth-
er on this occasion, and I met him on the staircase;
but he passed me by, and did not recognize me out
of my place in the second row of chairs, nor did I
venture to speak to him. I still remember the
strange thrill we felt, and which ran in a whisper
along the class, when we heard that Henrietta P.
had been refused her first communion for going
to a ball within a week of the event. She came no
IN VILLEGGIATURA 149
more to the meetings. The girls sat in their places
on rows of straw chairs, and many of the parents
accompanied them. Sometimes in a corner by the
window holding up a small Bible, in which he fol-
lowed the references with attention, there sat an
oldish gentleman, who was (so we were told) the
great prime-minister, M. Guizot.
My father did not sail for America till the au-
tumn of that year, but we remained on at Paris with
our grandparents. The sun streamed into our apart-
ments all day long, for we had windows looking to
every side of the compass. When Paris was get-
ting intolerably hot, we started for the country,
where my grandfather had taken a country-house
on a lease for two or three years, in a village called
Mennecy, near Corbeil. Mennecy was a straggling
little village among peat fields, crossed by narrow
black streams, or canals, of the color of the peat.
Growing by the banks were long rows of stumpy
willow-trees, cut year by year for the sake of the
osiers, which were sold to the basket-makers. Here
and there, perhaps at the turn of the stream, some
single tree had been allowed to grow to its natural
dimensions, forming a sequestered nook where some
of us used to bathe on hot summer days'. Two
young friends of my grandmother's Laura and
Pauline C. were with us most of the time we were
150 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
living in this villcggiatura, and Pauline especially
loved the water, and used to come home fresh and
smiling and pluming herself after her cool divings.
Mennecy was a rural spot among willow -trees, a
perfect retreat for hot weather.
There was an old paved place in the centre of
the village, leading to a fine old church well served
and well frequented, of which the Sunday bells
clanged far across the country. We used to see the
congregation assembling in cheerful companies, ar-
riving from outlying farms, and greeting each other
in the market-place before the mass began ; a con-
gregation with more of talk and animation than
with us, with blue smocks and white linen coiffcs,
and picturesque country cloaks and sabots. \Ye
used somewhat ruefully to wish to follow Pauline
and Louise (our cross maid-of-all-work) through the
swing-doors behind which the incense was tossing
and the organ rolling out its triumphant fugue. A
Roman Catholic service seems something of a high
festival, coming round Sunday after Sunday, a rite
bringing excitement and adoration along with it.
Our own village church -bells also ring out, calling
to the peaceful congregations; calling us to some-
thing more tranquil, more free, and more full of in-
dividual feeling to an aspiration rather than to a
rite.
My grandparents' house had once been a hunt-
IN VILLEGGIATURA 151
ing-lodge belonging to Henry IV., who loved the
neighborhood, and frequented Compiegne long
years before the President Louis Napoleon, or
the Emperor Napoleon III. and his courtiers, and
their ladies in hunting-costumes, and with spirit-
ed horses and fanfarons, all followed the chase. I
don't remember ever seeing any of them, but we
had a general impression that those hunting com-
panies were about, and any day a gay procession,
not unlike something out of a fairy-tale, might
come riding past our old gates. They were old
creaking gates, which had once been green, now
gray and weather-stained ; our high walls, which had
once been white, were also green and stained and
overgrown by a vine. M. Roche had given \\sjoce-
lyn to read about a year before, and I used to think
of the description of the cure's home as I stood in
the old court -yard at Mennecy, with its well and
its vine-clad walls. There was an old well with a
wrought-iron top to it and a rope, and there was a
vine travelling along the margin and spreading be-
yond it, along the wrought-iron railing, to the pret-
ty old iron gate dividing the court -yard from the
old garden at the back, which, with its dainty, rusty
iron scrolls, excluded the cocks and hens that flap-
ped and picketed and strutted all day long in the
front court, and roosted at night in the great empty
stables opposite our house.
152 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
The hunting-lodge, before it had become our
home, had been turned into a farm ; the knights
and cavaliers had made way for blouses and cow-
herds, and the hunters had given up their stalls
to heavy cart-horses, though, indeed, there was
room to spare for any number of either. But the
farmer died in time, and his widow married the
milkman, and she let the old place to my grand-
father, who had a special purpose in coming to
Mennecy.
A flight of stone steps led from the court-yard
to the house, just as one sees in Scotland, which
looks so like France in places. Our front windows
opened on to a garden, and the passages and the
sitting-rooms were panelled in some parts. We
could walk all round the drawing-room between
the panels and the walls ; nor was it dark within
the wainscot, for there were two little windows at
either end to give light to the spiders and the ac-
tive mice who chiefly frequented this passage. The
floors were all of brick, on which we had laid a. car-
pet, and my grandmother had brought a blue sofa
and chairs from Paris, and hired a piano in Corbeil.
" Qucl charmant.. meuble 1" our neighbor the
Maire used to say when he came in of an evening,
bowing politely to the piano and then to us. Pol-
ished rosewood! ivory keys! gilt handles ! He was
genuine in his enthusiastic admiration. To hear
IN VILLEGGIATURA 153
him one would think there had never been such a
piano since the world began. It got very much
out of tune, but that did not shake our faith in it.
We gave parties on the strength of the charmant
uicublc. Piano company (so we considered our-
selves) was not so very common in the neighbor-
hood. Laura could play (as she still does) to the
delight of her listeners ; Pauline had a very sweet
mezzo soprano voice, and used to sing to the piano
and to us of summer evenings. M. le Maire was
also very fond of singing and of being accompanied.
His wife was not musical, but our young ladies were
very patient and kind, and used to repeat the more
difficult passages over and over again for him, and
try not to laugh when he went very much out of
tune. My sister and I used to find the panelled
passages a convenient retreat occasionally, when a
note went very wildly astray ; or we could always
run out through the French windows into the gar-
den, where the grasshoppers' concert would also
strike up of fine summer evenings, and seemed to
whistle and spread far, far beyond the corn-fields
and the poppy - heads. There was a terrace at the
end of the garden where a pavilion stood overlook-
ing the high-road, from which we could see the reg-
iments as they passed on their way to Corbeil, and
the dragoons watering their horses at the little vil-
lage inn. All along this terrace grew pumpkin
154 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
plants, which we scarcely noticed when we first ar-
rived, although we were full of admiration for the
luxuriant vines hanging from all the walls, and of
which one charming tunnelled avenue ran right
across a corner of the garden. Pauline and I used
to sit there that summer-time under the green shad-
ows, making believe to learn Italian with Goldoni
and a dictionary that is to say, I was making
believe ; she not only learned the language, but
married a Milanese gentleman in after-years. Only
the other day, as we sat entranced by Madame
Duse's gracious inspirations, I seemed for the first
time to enter into the real spirit of those by-gone
and almost forgotten studies. Goldoni suddenly
came to life again, and I thought of the old green
vine avenue, and the books I had been bored by as
a girl began to speak to me for the first time. As
the autumn \vent on myriads of wasps appeared ;
the grapes swelled and turned to golden sweetness;
we used to go into the garden with hunches of
bread, and gather our own breakfasts and lunch-
eons growing on the walls. Along with the grapes
came the pumpkins, and they also grew. Cinder-
ella's were nothing to them ; the huge balls came
swelling and rolling down upon us, coloring and
rising in every direction. We got frightened at
last it seemed wicked to waste them ; we boiled
them, we passed them through sieves, we steeped
IN VILLEGGIATURA 155
them in milk by the Maire's advice. At the end of
three or four days we absolutely loathed them.
The pigs of the neighborhood, already satiated
with pumpkin, refused to touch them any more.
On the fifth day a neighbor sent us in a great bas-
ketful as a present. We were literally bombarded
with pumpkins that year, but let us hope it was a
specially good year for fruit.
I said that my grandfather had a special purpose
in view when he brought us to Mennecy. Our dear
Colonel Newcome had a fancy that he could re-
habilitate the family fortunes by establishing a
manufactory for peat fuel, which was to be made
by the help of an ingenious machine. It had been
invented by an old friend, who had sold him the
patent for a certain sum, and as a special favor.
This same friend, who seems to have been ingen-
ious, though an expensive acquaintance, had also
invented a wooden horse, which was to supersede
the usual living quadrupeds. It had the great ad-
vantage of only eating coal and coke, but I believe
it was found all the same to be much more ex-
pensive than the real animal, and far less intelli-
gent. I remember seeing the ingeniously carved
hoofs of the wooden horse standing on the piano,
with a drawing for his cast-iron inside. I was only
once shown the peat-machine ; it looked something
like a stove, and used to be poked by an old woman,
156 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
while a little boy with a barrow brought up the
peat, which was then and there turned into black
cakes. We never made our fortunes out of the
peat, but we burned a great stack of it, which glowed
bright and clear, and lasted through several winters,
and I believe the whole thing was finally handed
over to an experimentalist on the spot, who may
still be there for all I know. He was a short and
swarthy man, who used to come and bargain in the
dining-room at enormous length.
As my grandparents had spent several summers
at Mennecy, they had made acquaintance with the
two or three neighbors, and with the family at the
clidteau. We used to pass the chateau when we
walked along the high-road, which was divided from
the park by a wall. Here and there were iron gates,
through which we could see into the shady avenues
of poplar -trees and nut-trees, and in one place,
where an old bridge crossed a stream, we caught
sight of the old white house, with its shutters and
chimneys and high slated roof. There had been
another, a finer one, before this, we were told, stand-
ing in a different corner of the same park. A fine
old gateway still remained with its heraldic carvings
and mementos of the past, but the road had trav-
elled on elsewhere, and no longer passed under it, as
it did once long ago when the king's hunt used to
come along the avenue, which now led from noth-
IN VILLEGGIATURA 157
ing to nowhere. There is a description of this very
place in Lucien Percy's delightful Memoirs of Pres-
ident Renault and Madame Du Deffand :
" The first chdtcau belonged to the early days of Louis
XV., and was inhabited by the great Marechal de Villeroi,"
says the book. " Remy Renault had a pretty country-
house at Etioles [Etioles comes back to me with its willow-
trees and dark amber canals] ; it was the house that Ma-
dame de Pompadour afterwards lived in. Renault used to
spend part of the year there, and as his son was fond of
sport, he bought for him from the Marechal de Villeroi a
rangership and the place of Governor of Corbeil. The old
Marechal took a fancy to young Renault, and used to keep
him to stay at the chateau, and also at his little house at
Soisy, near Etioles. As ranger of the district Renault often
received the Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke
of Berry, who used to come with a small suite to Ville-
neuve-Saint-Georges. The Dauphin used to hunt wolves,
accompanied by the ranger ; the young princes only shot
pheasants. It is curious nowadays to think of people hunt-
ing wolves at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges," continues Lucien
Percy, still conjuring up my past for me, and then he gives
a note, saying : " The remains of the Chateau de Villeroi
still exist on the right hand of the road from Corbeil to
Mennecy, a road which is always called in the country ' La
route de Villeroi.' "
And this was the road along which we used to
straggle of summer evenings.
The people who were living at the chateau when
we lived at Mennecy (the first ch&tcau, I believe, was
158 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
burned down during the First Revolution) were
retired manufacturers who had given up business,
and who now dwelt at ease and in dignity, sheltered
by the high slated roofs and chimneys of the old
place. My grandparents had been introduced to
the family by our friend the Maire, and when we all
went up to call with him one day, the younger mem-
bers of the party were not without hopes of finding
some companions there, for we had seen a girl of
about our own age, who was, so the Maire told
us, an heiress, and the only daughter of the house.
As we walked up through the park we met the
gardener, who left his work to escort us to the
front door, calling loudly to a maid who sat darn-
ing stockings in the marble hall. She in turn put
down her work and disappeared through a tall
carved doorway, returning almost immediately to
ask us to go in. We found ourselves in a big draw-
ing-room with polished floors, and with many tall
windows opening to the garden ; some of them
were shuttered and curtained, and the room -was
rather dark. In it sat, in a semicircle with chairs
ready placed, the stout mother, the burly father,
and the broad-shouldered heiress in her plaid frock.
They received us very coldly, looking at us with cu-
riosity and aloofness, as if we had been specimens
of some strange, unknown race. I thought the
gardener and the sewing-maid also stared at us,
IN VILLEGGIATURA 159
when they returned, almost immediately, with trays
of refreshment biscuits and glasses of beer, which
were handed round already poured out. I do not
know if this were a custom peculiar to the neighbor-
hood, or only to this particular family. The young
lady seemed surprised that we should refuse.
" What, English, and you do not take beer ?" she
said, placing her tumbler between her knees. Be-
tween her draughts she then went on to ask us
many questions about that strange country to
which we belonged, about our outlandish ways and
singular habits. It was a very different catechism
from M. Malan's. '' Did we ever go to church at
all ?" " Did we ever say any prayers?" " Did not
heretics fast every Sunday, instead of making it
a fete-day ?" " Had we ever heard of the Virgin
Mary [surprise expressed] and the saints [more sur-
prise] ?" Our friend the Maire saw with pain that
we young ladies were not getting on, and tried to
bring the conversation round to other more con-
genial topics than those fundamental differences
for which we should all have burned one another a
century before ; he therefore introduced the piano
by way of a diversion, the cJiannant mcublc from
Corbeil, and I could see that we slightly rose in our
host's estimation, but I came away all the same
very much put out. It is disagreeable to be both
damned in the future and looked down upon in the
l6o CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
present, as one belonging to an ignorant and bar-
barous race. I felt as if all the Catholic saints in
Paradise, certainly all the French ones, were shrug-
ging their shoulders at us when we came away, and
I spoke quite crossly to M. le Maire when he asked
me what I thought of the chateau.
There used to be an odd stout figure walking
about Mennecy in a workman's blouse and loose
trousers, and with a cropped head of black hair and
an old casquette. We were told that it was a
woman ; and a wholly supposititious impression once
arose in some one's mind that it might have been
George Sand herself. I passed quite close by on
one occasion, when the mysterious personage looked
round and then turned away, and I thrilled from
head to foot. How odd those mysterious moments
are when nothing seems to be happening, but which
nevertheless go on all the rest of one's life. I saw
a face, stolid and sad, giving me an impression of
pain and long endurance which comes back still.
It seemed to be a woman's face, flabby and tanned,
not old. There was no gayety in it, no adventure
in the eyes; but expiation, endurance, defiance, I
know not what tragedy, was expressed by that thick-
set, downcast figure. I have now, alas, no doubt
that it was not George Sand. I had not read any
of her books then, but we had many things to read
besides in the old garden. There were various
IN VILLEGGIATURA l6l
books my father had given us and told us to read
during his absence, Macaulay's Essays among them ;
and there was Pcndcnnis, which I had brought away
from home, and which has always seemed to me
more like hearing him talk than any other of his
books; and, above all, there were his letters which
came from time to time. He was giving lectures
at Manchester and elsewhere before sailing for
America, and there is one of his letters folded in
three, and addressed on the back to my sister at
Mennecy, Seine-et-Oise.
" You see here is the stuck-up hand as you like it best. . . .
I have not a great deal to say in the stuck-up hand. Ken-
sington is so gloomy that I can't stand it. ... How dismal
it must be for poor Eliza [Eliza was the housekeeper], who
has no friends to go to, who must stop in the kitchen all
day. As I think of her I feel inclined to go back and sit in
the kitchen with Eliza, but I dare say I shouldn't amuse her
much, and after she had told me about the cat, and how
her father was, we should have nothing more to say to one
another. Last week I was away at Manchester, when I
broke down in a speech before 3000 ladies and gentlemen.
I felt very foolish, but I tried again at night and did better,
and as there is nothing more wicked in breaking down in a
speech than in slipping on a bit of orange-peel and breaking
one's nose, why, I got up again, and made another speech
at night without breaking down. It's all custom, and most
people can no more do it than they can play the piano
without learning. I hope you and are learning hard
to play me to sleep when I come back from America. I
1 62 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
believe I am going to Birmingham next week with the lect-
ures, and then to Manchester, and then Steward, bring
me a basin !"
Many years afterwards, long after I married, the
good and beautiful Lady Pease gave us the great
pleasure of meeting Mr. John Bright at dinner at
her house. I sat next Mr. Bright, and he began
speaking to me of my father, and of this very time.
" I remember," he said, " taking him to a meeting
at Manchester, just before he went to America with
his lectures. He broke down, and he was very
much annoyed, and he said to me : ' Who will ever
come and hear me lecture if I break down like this
before such a number of people ?' And I said to
him: 'Never you mind; very few people don't
break down at one time or another. You come
along with me this evening; I'm going to another
meeting; I'm not going to speak to fine fal-lal folks,
but to a set of good, honest wod<ing-men, and you
must try again.' And he spoke," said Mr. Bright,
in his downright way, "and I never heard a better
speech in all my life; it was a capital speech, and
they were all delighted with him." And then and
there Mr. Bright told me another little anecdote of
my father, whom he had met a short while before
his death at the Reform Club. He said that as he
was passing through the hall, he met him standing
in his way and he stepped back, took off his hat,
IN VILLEGGIATURA 163
and stood with it in his outstretched hand. " What
is that for?" said Mr. Bright. "Why do you hold
your hat like that?" " Because I see the most con-
sistent politician I know going by," said my father,
" and I take off my hat to him."
When my father sailed for America, people were
very kind to us, and wrote to us with news of him.
Esmond came for my grandmother, and a box which
we received at Paris puzzled us very much, and de-
lighted us no less than it puzzled us. It contained
a magnificent iced cake, anonymously and carefully
packed with strips of many-colored paper. It was
not my father who had sent it, as we imagined, nor
was it till long afterwards that we discovered that
the sender was Mrs. Procter. Many things are re-
membered of her, but how many kind deeds there
have been of hers without a name to them !
Once the letters began to arrive from America
we were all much happier, for we seemed in touch
with him once more, and to know what was happen-
ing. He was fairly well and in good spirits, and
making friends and making money. I remember
his writing home on one occasion and asking us to
send him out a couple of new stomachs, so hospi-
table were his friends over the water, so numerous
the dinners and suppers to which he was invited.
When the long summer and winter were over,
and the still longer spring, suddenly one day we
164 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
heard that he was coming back much sooner than
he expected. I believe he saw a steamer starting
for home and could stand it no longer, and then
and there came off.
I can still remember sitting with my grandpar-
ents, expecting his return. My sister and I sat
on the red sofa in the little study, and shortly be-
fore the time we had calculated that he might ar-
rive came a little ring at the front-door bell. My
grandmother broke down ; my sister and I rushed
to the front door, only we were so afraid that it
might not be he that we did not dare to open it,
and there we stood until a second and much louder
ringing brought us to our senses. " Why didn't you
open the door?" said my father, stepping in, looking
well, broad, and upright, laughing. In a moment
he had never been away at all.
TOUT CHEMIN
X
AFTER his return from America my father took
an apartment in Paris for the autumn months, and
it was then that he told us he had made a plan for
wintering in Rome. It almost seems to me now
that all the rest of my life dates in some measure
from those old Roman days, which were all the
more vivid because my sister and I were still spec-
tators and not yet actors in the play. I was just
fifteen, my sister was still a little girl, but I thought
myself a young woman. I have written elsewhere
of Mrs. Kemble and Mrs. Sartoris and the Brown-
ings, who were all living at Rome that winter, with
a number of interesting people, all drinking, as w r e
were about to do, of the waters of Trevi. How few
of us returned to the fountain! But the proverb, I
think, must apply to one's spiritual return. For,
though one may drink and drink, and go back again
and again, it is ever a different person that stands
by the fountain, whereas the shadowy self by the
stone basin, bending over the rushing water, is the
same, and does not change.
We started early in December, my father, my
1 68 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
sister, and I. He had his servant with him, for
already his health had begun to fail him. We
reached Marseilles in bitter weather late one night.
We laid our travelling plaids upon our beds to keep
ourselves warm, but though we shivered, our spirits
rose to wildest pitch next morning in the excite-
ment of the golden moment. The wonderful sights
in the streets are before me still the Jews, Turks,
dwellers in Mesopotamia, chattering in gorgeous
colors and strange languages ; the quays with their
crowded shipping and the amethyst water. I can
still see, in a sort of mental picture, a barge piled
with great golden onions floating along one of the
quays, guided by a lonely w r oman in blue rags with
a colored kerchief on her head. " There goes the
Lady of Shalot," said my father ; and when we
looked at him rather puzzled, for we knew noth-
ing of onions and very little of Tennyson in those
days, he explained that a shalot was a species of
onion, and after a moment's reflection we took in
his little joke, feeling that nobody ever thought of
such droll things as he did. Then we reached our
hotel again, where there were Turks still drinking
coffee under striped awnings, and a black man in a
fez, and a lank British diplomat, with a very worn
face, who knew my father, arriving from some out-
landish place with piles of luggage ; and we caught
sight of the master of the hotel and his family
TOUT CHEMIN 169
gathered round a soup-tureen in a sort of glass con-
servatory, and so went up-stairs to rest and refresh
ourselves before our start that evening. All this
splendor and novelty and lux mundi had turned
our heads, for we forgot our warm wraps and half
our possessions at the hotel, and did not discover,
till long after the steamer had started with all of us
on board, how many essentials we had left behind.
The sun was setting as we steamed out of Mar-
seilles, and the rocky island of If stood out dark
and crisp against the rush of bright wavelets, across
which we strained our eyes to see Monte Cristo in
his sack splashing into the water of the bay. Then
we got out to sea, and the land disappeared by de-
grees. How the stars shone that night on board
the big ship ! The passengers were all on deck
talking in a pleasant murmur of voices, broken by
laughs and exclamations. Among them were some
people who specially attracted us, a very striking
and beautiful quartet from the north. There was
a lovely mother, oldish, widowed, but very beauti-
ful still ; the two charming daughters, one tall and
lovely, the other -a piquante brunette; there was the
son, one of the handsomest young men I have ever
seen. They were going to Rome, they told us, for
the winter. Christina, the eldest girl, was dressed
in white. She seemed to me some fair Urania, con-
trolling: the stars in their wondrous maze as she and
170 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
I and my sister paced the deck till it was very late,
and some bell sounded, and my father came up and
sent us down to our cabin. Then the night turned
bitter cold, and, as we had left our shawls on the
shores of France, we made haste to get to bed and
to be warm. Though it was cold, we liked fresh air
and were glad to find that our port-holes had been
left open by the steward ; we scrambled into our
berths, and fell asleep. I lay at the top, and my
sister in the berth below. How well I remember
waking suddenly in a slop of salt-water ! The ship
was sinking, we were all going to be drowned, and
with a wild shriek calling to my sister I sprang from
the cabin and rushed up the companion-steps on
deck. I thought she called me back, but I paid
no heed as I reached the top of the companion-
ladder, dripping and almost in tears, with my fatal
announcement. There I encountered the steward,
who began to laugh, and who led me back crest-
fallen to our cabin, at the door of which my sister
was standing. The water was dancing in, .in a
stream, and the steward scolded us well as he
screwed up the port -holes and got us some dry
bedding. Next morning, to my inexpressible mor-
tification, I heard some people telling the story.
" She rushed on deck, and declared the ship was
sinking," said one voice to another. I didn't wait
to hear any more, but fled.
TOUT CHEMIN 171
The wind went down again, but it was still bit-
ter cold, and we shivered without our wraps, as we
steamed up to Genoa along the spreading quays
with their background of gorgeous palaces and
cloud-capped towers. There were convicts in their
chains at work upon the great steps of the quay,
who stared at us as we landed. And the very first
thing which happened to us when we found our-
selves in Italy at last the land where citrons
bloom, where orange flowers scent the air was
that we drove straight away to a narrow back
street, where we were told we should find a shop
for English goods, and then and there my father
bought us each a warm gray wrap, with stripes of
black, nothing in the least Italian or romantic, but
the best that we could get. And then, as we had
now a whole day to spend on shore, and shawls to
keep us warm, we drove about the town, and after
visiting a palace or two took the railway, which
had been quite lately opened to Pisa. The weath-
er must have changed as the day went on, for it
was sunshine, not Shetland wool, that warmed us
at last ; but the wind was blowing still, and what
I specially remember in the open Piazza at Pisa
is the figure of a stately monk, whose voluminous
robes were fluttering and beating as he passed us,
wrapped in darkness, mystical, majestic, with all the
light beyond his stateliness and the cathedral in its
172 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
glory and the Leaning Tower aslant in the sunlight
for a background.
Our adventures for the day were not yet over.
At the station we found two more of the ship's
passengers, young men with whom we had made
acquaintance, and we all returned to Genoa to-
gether. The train was late, and we had to be on
board at a certain time, so that we engaged a car-
riage, and drove quickly to the quay, where the
convicts clanking in their chains were still at work.
A boat was found, rowed by some sailors who cer-
tainly did not wear chains, but who were otherwise
not very unlike those industrious convicts in ap-
pearance. The bargain was made, we entered the
boat all five, and as we were getting in we could
see our great ship in the twilight looking bigger
than ever, and one rocket and then another going
off towards the dawning stars. " They are signal-
ling for us," said one of our companions ; " we shall
soon be on board."
We had rowed some twenty strokes from the
shore by this time, when suddenly the boatmen
left off rowing ; they put down their oars, and one
of them began talking volubly, though I could not
understand what he said. " What's to be done?"
said one of the young men to my father. " They
say they won't go on unless we give them fifty
francs more," and he began shaking his head and
TOUT CHEMIN 173
remonstrating in broken Italian. The boatmen
paid no attention, shrugged their shoulders, and
waited, as if they were determined never to row
another stroke. Then the steamer sent up two
more rockets, which rose through the twilight,
bidding us hurry ; and then suddenly my father
rose up in the stern of the boat where he was sit-
ting, and standing tall and erect, and in an anger
such as I had never seen him in before or after in
all my life, he shouted out in loud and indignant
English, " D n you, go on !" a simple maledic-
tion which carried more force than all the Italian
polysyllables and expostulations of our companions.
To our surprise and great relief, the men seemed
frightened, and took to their oars again and began
o o o
to row, grumbling and muttering. When we got
on board the ship, they told us it was a well-known
trick the Genoese boatmen were in the habit of
playing upon travellers, and that they would have
sent a boat for us if we had delayed any longer.
We reached our journey's end next morning, and
landed at Civita Vecchia about mid-day. This land-
ing was no less wonderful than everything else, we
thought, as we looked in awe at the glorious blaze
of color, at the square Campanile with its flat tilted
roof, and at all that we were going to see, which
was there to meet us on the very shore. To begin
with, there was the chorus from the Opera waiting
174 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
in readiness men with pointed hats and Italian
legs, women in fancy dress, with fancy-dress babies,
all laughing, talking in Italian, and at home in
Italy. We had some trouble in getting our luggage
through the dogana. Most of the other travellers
started before we did, and we were among the
last to start for Rome. My father was anxious
to get on, for there were unpleasant rumors about
brigands on the road. Another family (Russians)
with a courier and a great deal of luggage was to
follow us, and some one suggested we should wait
for their escort ; but, on the whole, my father de-
cided to start. The afternoon shadows were begin-
ning to lengthen, when at length we were packed
and ready. We had a mouldy post-chaise, with a
gray ragged lining, and our luggage on the top.
We hoped to get to Rome before dark. I remem-
ber thrilling as my father buttoned his overcoat
and told us he had put his hundred louis for safety
into an inner pocket.
The country is not very beautiful between 'Civita
Vecchia and Rome at least, I do not remember
anything to distract our attention from our alarms.
We were just frightened enough to be stimulated
and amused as we jolted past the wide fields where
the men were at work. We sat all three abreast
in the jolting old carriage. My father's servant
was on the box. We were reading our Tauchnitz
TOUT CHEMIN 175
books, being tired of watching the flat horizons,
when suddenly the carriage stopped, and Charles
Pearman, with a pale face of alarm, came to the
window and said that one of the traces had broken,
and that there were a number of people all com-
ing round the carriage. We were surrounded by
people as if by magic satyrs, shepherds, strange
bearded creatures with conical hats, and with pitch-
forks in their hands. The sun was just setting, and
dazzling into our faces all the time. For some five
minutes we waited, looking at each other in silence,
and wondering what was going to come next. At
the end of that time, and after a good deal of con-
versation with the postilions, the satyrs and fauns
went their way with their pitchforks, leaving us,
to our inexpressible relief, to continue our journey.
*
Then came the dusk at last, and the road seemed
longer and longer. I think I had fallen asleep in
my corner, when my father put his hand on my
shoulder. " Look !" he said ; and I looked, and,
lo ! there rose the dusky dome of St. Peter's gray
upon the dark-blue sky.
Very soon afterwards some one with a lantern
opened the gates of Rome and examined our pass-
port, and let us in. We drove to our hotel in the
Via Condotti, and when we awoke it was to the
sound of countless church bells in the morning
light.
176 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
When we leaned from the window of our entresol
sitting-room, with its odd yellow walls, we could
almost touch the heads of the passers-by. It was
Sunday morning; all the bells were flinging and
ringing, and they seemed to be striking and vibrat-
ing against that wonderful blue sky overhead. How
well I remember my first Roman contadina as she
walked majestically along the street below black-
haired, white-becapped, white-besleeved, and cov-
ered with ornaments on her way to mass.
The Piazza. d'Espagna, at the end of our street,
was one flood of sunshine, in which other contadi-
nas and bambinos and romantic shepherds were all
floating when we came out to look and to winder.
Wonderful as it all was, it seemed also almost disap-
pointing. We had expected, we didn't know what ;
and this was something- something tangible, appre-
ciable, and, so far, less than we expected. "Wait
a little," said my father ; " people are always a little
disappointed when they first come to Rome."
I remember long after hearing Mr. Ap'pleton,
that wise and witty American, say, " People expect
to taste the result of two thousand years of civili-
zation in a morning. It takes more than a morn-
ing to receive so much into one's mind . . a life-
o
time is not too long." Mr. Appleton was right
when he said it takes a lifetime to realize some
ideas. But now and then one certainly lives a
TOUT CHEMIN 177
lifetime almost in a comparatively flying minute ;
and those two months at Rome, short as they were,
have lasted my lifetime. The people, the sights,
the sounds, have never quite ceased for me yet.
They have become an habitual association, and
have helped to make that mental standard by
which one habitually measures the events as they
follow one another.
The first evening in Rome, as we sat at dinner at
the table d'hote, in the dark vaulted dining-room,
all the people, I remember, were talking confused-
ly of an attack by brigands upon some Russians on
the road from Civita Vecchia the very vagueness
of the rumor made it the more impressive to us.
There is a letter from my father which he must
have written to his mother the very next day; it is
dated Hotel Franz, via Condotti, December 6.
" We have very comfortable quarters at the hotel
where I lived before," he writes, " except for some
animal that bit me furiously when I was asleep yes-
terday on the sofa. It can't be a bug, of course
the chambermaid declares she has never seen such
a thing, nor so much as a flea, so it must be a scor-
pion, I suppose," and he goes on to compare St.
Peter's to Pisa. " We agreed Pisa is the best," he
says. " The other is a huge heathen parade. The
founder of the religion utterly disappears under the
enormous pile of fiction and ceremony that has
178 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
been built round him. I'm not quite sure that I
think St. Peter's handsome. The front is positive-
ly ugly, that is certain, but nevertheless the city is
glorious. We had a famous walk on the Pincio, and
the sun set for us with a splendor quite imperial. I
wasn't sorry when the journey from Civita Vecchia
was over. Having eighty or ninety louis in my
pocket, I should have been good meat for the
brigands had they chosen to come."
Very soon our friends began to appear Mr.
Browning, Mr. Sartoris, Mr. /Eneas Macbean. Mr.
Macbean was the English banker. He was the
kindest of bankers, and used to send us piles of the
most delightful books to read. Lockhart's Scott
and Bulwer's heroes and Disraeli's saint-like politi-
cians all came to inhabit our palazzo, when we were
established there. Zanoni and that cat-like spirit of
the threshold are as vivid to me as any of the peo-
ple who used to come to dinner. We met our late
fellow-travellers (who now also seemed like old
friends) hurrying about in search of lodgings ; w r e
stood under the great dome of St. Peter's; we saw
the Tiber rushing under its bridges ; then, no doubt
in consequence of the scorpions, we went about to
look for lodgings, and it was Mr. Browning who
O *_> ' O
told us where to go. One can hardly imagine a
more ideal spot for little girls to live in than that to
which he directed us to a great apartment over
TOUT CHEMIN 179
the pastry-cook's in the Palazzo Poniatowski, in the
Via Delia Croce. We climbed a broad stone stair-
case with a handsome wrought-iron banister, we
clanged at an echoing bell, and a little old lady in
a camisole, rejoicing in the imposing name of Sign-
ora Ercole, opened the door, and showed us into
a dark outer hall. Then she led the way from room
to room, until we finally reached a drawing-room
with seven windows, at which we exclaimed in pre-
liminary admiration. Among the other items of
our installation were a Chinese museum, a library,
a dining-room with a brazen charcoal-burner in the
centre, and besides all these we were to have a bed-
room, a dressing-room, and a cupboard for my
father's servant. My father took the dressing-room
for himself. He put me and my sister into the big
bedroom to the front, and the man retired to the
cupboard in the hall. Signora Ercole, our land-
lady, also hospitably offered us the run of her own
magnificent sitting-rooms, besides the four or five
we had engaged. I have a vague impression of her
family of daughters, also in camisoles, huddled
away into some humbler apartment, but we saw
little of them. We established ourselves in one
corner of the great drawing-room, clearing an inlaid
table of its lamps and statuettes, its wax flowers,
and other adornments. Then we felt at home. A
stone-mason suspended at his work began to sing in
l8o CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
mid-air just outside one of the windows, there came
to us the sound of the pfiffcrari from the piazza
down below, and the flutter of the white doves'
wings and their flying shadows upon the floor, to-
gether with a scent of flowers and sense of foun-
tains, and the fusty, fascinating smell from the old
hangings and bric-a-brac. I think the Ercoles must
have done some business as brocanteurs, for the fur-
niture was more like that of a museum than a hu-
man living-house ; all over the walls they had rows
of paintings in magnificent gildings, of which the
frames were the most important parts. All the
same, the whole effect was imposing and delightful,
and we felt like enchanted princesses in a palace,
and flew from room to room.
About luncheon-time my father sent us down to
the pastry-cook's shop, where we revelled among
cream tarts and pctits fours, and then we ordered
our dinner, as people did then, from a trattoria
near at hand. Then we went out again, still in our
raptures, and when dinner-time came, just about
sunset, excitement had given us good appetites,
notwithstanding the tarts. We were ready, but
dinner delayed. We waited more and more impa-
tiently as the evening advanced, but still no dinner
appeared. Then the English servant, Charles, was
called, and despatched to the cook-shop to make
inquiry. He came back much agitated, saying the
TOUT CHEMIN l8l
dinner had been sent that they assured him it had
been sent ! It had apparently vanished on its way
up the old palace stairs. " Go back," said my
father, " and tell them there is some mistake, and
that we are very hungry, and waiting still." The
man left the room, then returned again with a
doubtful look. There was a sort of box came an
hour ago, he said : " I have not opened it, sir."
With a rush my sister and I flew into the hall, and
there, sure enough, stood a square, solid iron box
with a hinged top. It certainly looked very unlike
dinner, but we raised it with faint hopes, which
were not disappointed ! Inside, and smoking still
upon the hot plates, was spread a meal like some-
thing in a fairy-tale roast birds and dressed meat,
a loaf of brown bread and compotes of fruit, and a
salad and a bottle of wine, to which good fare we
immediately sat down in cheerful excitement our
first Roman family meal together.
When people write of the past, those among us
who have reached a certain age are sometimes apt
to forget that it is because so much of it still exists
in our lives that it is so clear to us. And, as I have
said before, there is often a great deal more of the
past in the future than there was in the past itself
at the time. \Ve go back to meet our old selves,
more tolerant, forgiving our own mistakes, under-
standing it all better, appreciating its simple joys
182 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
and realities. There are compensations for the loss
of youth and fresh impressions ; and one learns lit-
tle by little that a thing is not over because it is not
happening with noise and shape or outward sign ;
its roots are in our hearts, and every now and then
they send forth a shoot which blossoms and bears
fruit still.
Early life is like a chapter out of Dickens, I think
one sees people then ; their tricks of expression,
their vivid sayings, and their quaint humors and
oddities do not surprise one ; one accepts every-
thing as a matter of course no matter how un-
usual it may be. Later in life one grows more fas-
tidious, more ambitious, more paradoxical ; one be-
gins to judge, or to make excuses, or to think about
one's companions instead of merely staring at them.
All the people we now saw for the first time vivid
but mysterious apparitions ; we didn't know what
they were feeling and thinking about, only we saw
them, and very delightful they all were to look at.
Meanwhile our education was not neglected: We
had a poetess to teach us a little Italian, a signora
with a magnificent husband in plaid trousers, to
whom I am sure she must have written many po-
ems. Once she asked us to spend an evening in
her apartment. It was high up in a house in a
narrow street, bare and swept, and we found a
company whose conversation (notwithstanding all
TOUT CHEMIN 183
Madame Elconora Torti's instructions) was quite
unintclligble to us. We all sat in a circle round a
great brass brazier in the centre of the bare room.
Every now and then the host took up an iron bar
and stirred the caldron round, and the fumes arose.
Two or three of the elder people sat in a corner
playing cards but here also we were at fault. The
cards represented baskets of flowers, coins, nuts, un-
known and mysterious devices ; among which the
familiar ace of diamonds was the only sign we could
recognize.
After these social evenings our man used to come
to fetch us home, through moonlight streets, past
little shrines with burning lamps, by fountains
plashing in the darkness. We used to reach our
great staircase, hurry up half frightened of ghosts
and echoes, but, being too much alive ourselves to
go quickly to sleep, we opened Mr. Macbean's fasci-
nating book, read by the light of our flaring can-
dles long after we had heard our father's door shut
and till the bell of the Frate in the convent close
by began to toll.
MRS. KEMBLE
XI
MY father was a very young man when he first
knew the Kemble family. In 1832 he himself was
twenty -one, a couple of years younger than Mrs.
Fanny Kemble, who was born in 1809. The men-
tions of the Kemble family in a diary which he
kept about that time are very constant. " Called
at Kemble's. Walked with Kemble in the Park."
(Kemble was John Mitchell Kemble, Mrs. Fanny
Kemble's brother.) "We met the Duke looking like
an old hero," he continues. " Breakfasted with
Kemble. Went to see the rehearsal of the Easter
piece at Covent Garden, with Farley in his glory."
Again : " Called at Kemble's. He read me some
very beautiful verses by Tennyson." On another
occasion my father speaks of seeing a " Miss Tot, a
very nice girl. Madam not visible ; " and again of
" Miss Fanny still in Paris. . . ."
It was in the year 1851, or thereabouts, that my
own scraps of recollections begin, and that I re-
member walking with my father along the high
street at Southampton, and somewhere near the
archway he turned, taking us with him into the old
l88 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
Assembly Rooms, where I heard for the first and
only time in all my life a Shakesperean reading
by Mrs. Fanny Kemble. I think it was the first
time I ever saw her. She came in with a stiff and
stately genuflection to the audience, took her seat
at the little table prepared for her, upon which she
laid her open book, and immediately began to
read. My sister and I sat on either side of our
father. He followed every word with attention ; I
cannot even make sure of the play after all these
years, but Falstaff was in it, and with a rout and
a shout a jolly company burst in. Was it Falstaff
and his companions, or were they
" Fairies, black, gray, green, and white,
You moonshine revellers "?
Suddenly the lady's voice rose, with some gen-
erous cheery chord of glorious fun and jollity. I
can hear the echo still and see her action as she
pointed outwards with both open hands, and my
father, with a start, bursting into sympathizing
laughter and plaudit, began crying " Bravo ! Bravo !"
and then again he sat listening and looking approv-
ingly through his spectacles. As we came away he
once more broke into praise. " Don't you see how
admirably she forgets herself?" he said ; " how she
throws herself into it all? how finely she feels it?"
My father was the best of audiences, a born critic
MRS. KEMBLE 189
and yet an enthusiast ; and to the last he could
throw himself into the passing mood, into the spirit
of the moment, while at the same time he knew
what it was he was admiring, and why he admired.
Some years passed before we met Mrs. Kcmble
again, in Rome. It was at a very hard and difficult
hour of her life, so I have heard her say, a time
when she needed all her courage to endure her
daily portion of suffering. I was then a hobblede-
hoy, and (though she was no less kind to me then
than in later years) I only stared and wondered at
her ways, asking myself what she meant, and how
much she meant by the things she said ; but when
I, too, was an older woman the scales fell from my
eyes.
One had to learn something one's self before
one could in the least appreciate her. When the
gods touch one's hair with gray, then comes some
compensating revelation of what has been and still
is. Now I can understand the passionate way in
which Mrs. Kemble used in early times to speak of
slavery ; then I used to wonder, nor realize in the
least what she felt, when she would sometimes start
to her feet in agitation and passionate declamation ;
she who with streaming eyes and wrung heart had
walked about the plantations feeling more, perhaps,
than any slave could do what it was to be a slave.
To her free and ruling nature every hour of bond-
190 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
age must have seemed nothing short of tort-
ure. In those far-back Roman days of which I
have been writing, she used to take us out driving
with her from time to time. " Where shall I drive
to?" asked the coachman. " Andate al Diavolo!"
said Mrs. Kemble, gayly. " Go where you will,
only go!" And away we drive through the streets,
and out by garden walls and garden gates to the
Campagna, and as we drive along she begins to
sing to us. I could box my own past ears for won-
dering what the passers-by would think of it, in-
stead of enjoying that by-gone song.
I can also remember Mrs. Kemble sitting dressed
in a black dress silently working all through the
evening by her sister's fireside, and gravely stitch-
ing on and on, while all the brilliant company came
and went, and the music came and went. In those
days Mrs. Kemble had certain dresses which she
wore in rotation whatever the occasion might be.
If the black gown chanced to fall upon a gala-day
she wore it, if the pale silk gown fell upon a work-
ing-day she wore it ; and I can still hear an Ameri-
can girl exclaiming with dismay as the delicate
folds of a white silk embroidered with flowers went
sweeping over the anemones in the Pamphili Gar-
dens. Another vivid impression I have is of an
evening visit Mrs. Kemble paid Mrs. Browning in
the quiet little room in the Bocca di Leone, only lit
MRS. KEMDLE IQI
by a couple of tapers and by the faint glow of the
fire. I looked from one to the other: Mrs. Brown-
ing welcoming her guest, dim in her dusky gown
unrelieved ; Mrs. Kemblc upright and magnificent,
robed on this occasion like some Roman empress in
stately crimson edged with gold. It happened to
be the red-dress day, and she wore it. " How do
you suppose I could have lived my life," I once
heard her say, " if I had not lived by rule, if I had
not made laws for myself and kept to them ?" Out
of this stress of feeling, out of this passionate re-
bellion against fate, she grew to the tender, the
noble and spirited maturity of her later days. In
time, by habit and degrees, we learn to understand
a little more how to fit ourselves to circumstances,
and life begins to seem possible and to contain
certain elements of peace and of philosophy ; it is
in mid-life when we try to accommodate our own
wants and wishes to those of others that the strain
is greatest and the problem occasionally passes be-
yond our powers of solution. Indeed, very few so-
lutions are possible, though wise compromises exist
for us all. Some are more adaptable than others,
and not having very positive selves to manage, hav-
ing impressions rather than strong convictions to
act upon, they run fairly well along other people's
lines ; but when strong feeling, vivid realizations,
passionate love of truth and justice, uncompromis-
192 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
ing faith exist, then experience becomes hard in-
deed. When Mrs. Kemble went to her rest only
the other day, few among the critics who spoke so
inadequately of that great personality, who wrote
their conventional praise or indiscriminating blame,
had come into touch with the magnetism of her
personal inspiration. One only, her own and her
daughter's personal friend, Mr. Henry James, to
whom she turned with confidence and love to the
very last, has found words to write that of her which
those who knew her best will best appreciate. " A
prouder nature never fronted the long humiliation
of life," he says, touching upon the more tragic side
of her history.
One should have a different language to speak
with of each of those one has loved and admired in
turn. Such a language exists in one's heart, but
how can one translate it into print ? Some people
seem like green places in the desert; one thinks of
them, and one is at rest. It is also true that there
exist a certain number who oppress one with name-
less discouragement, bores past and present. But
the Elect are those who put life into one, who give
courage to the faint-hearted, hope out of their own
hearts' constancy; to these Fanny Kemble be-
longed indeed. To the end she retained the power
of making new friends, of being loved by them and
of loving them. One member of my own family,
MRS. KEMBLE 193
whom the elder lady was pleased to christen Rosa-
lind, only knew her when she was long past seventy
years of age, but what a true and spontaneous
friendship was that which sprang up between them
both, one which added, so wrote Mrs. Wister, to
the happiness of her mother's later years. Mrs.
Kemble returned love with love in full measure,
whether it came to her in the shape of beauti-
ful white azaleas from an old friend's hand, or of
music played so as to delight her fine taste, or even
as dumme Licbe with nothing to say, nothing to
show.
I once went out shopping with her one spring
morning when she thought her room would look
the brighter for muslin curtains to admit the light.
She carried a long purse full of sovereigns in her
hand. We drove to Regent Street to a shop where
she told me her mother and her aunt used both to
go. It may have been over that very counter that
the classic " Will it wash?" was uttered. The shop-
man, who had assuredly not served Mrs. Siddons
or he would have learned his lesson earlier in life,
produced silken hangings and worsted and fabrics
of various hues and textures to Mrs. Kemble's great
annoyance. I had gone to another counter and
came back to find her surrounded by draperies, sit-
ting on her chair and looking very serious ; distant
thunder seemed in the air. " Young man," she
IQ4 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
said to the shopman, " perhaps your time is ot no
value to you to me my time is of great value. I
shall thank you to show me the things I asked for
instead of all these things for which I did not ask,"
and she flashed such a glance at him as must have
surprised the youth. He looked perfectly scared,
seemed to leap over the counter, and the muslin
curtains appeared on the spot.
Mrs. Kemble once asked me suddenly what color
her eyes were, and confused and unready I an-
swered, " Light eyes." At the moment indeed they
looked like amber, not unlike the eyes of some of
those captive birds one sees in their cages sitting
alone in the midst of crowds. Mrs. Kemble laughed
at my answer. " Light eyes ! Where are your own?
Do you not know that I have been celebrated for
my dark eyes?" she said; and then I looked again
and they were dark and brilliant, and looking at
me with a half-amused, half-reproachable earnest-
ness.
It must have been in the early years of the cen-
tury that Sir Thomas Lawrence sketched that well-
known and most charming head of Mrs. Fanny
Kemble with which we are most of us acquainted.
The oval face, the dark eyes, the wise young brows,
the glossy profusion of dark hair, represent her
youth ; she was no less striking in her age, though
MRS. KEMBLE IQ5
no great painter ever depicted it. She grew to
be old indeed, but it was only for a little while that
she was an old woman. Stately, upright, ruddy and
brown of complexion, almost to the very last; mo-
bile and expressive in feature, reproachful, mock-
ing, and humorous, heroic, uplifted in turn. This
was no old woman, feeling the throb of life with
an intensity far beyond that of younger people,
splendid in expression, vehement, and yet at times
tender with a tenderness such as is very rare. She
was indeed one of those coming from the moun-
tain, one of the bearers of good tidings. As a
girl I used to watch Mrs. Kemble stitching at her
worsted work, and so in later days we have all seen
her ; sitting in her arm-chair, dressed in her hand-
some black silk Paris dress and lace cap. She sits
upright by the window, with flowers on the table
beside her, while her birds are pecking in their
cage. For a long time she kept and tended cer-
tain American mocking-birds, letting them out of
their cages to fly about the room, and perch here
and there upon the furniture. " I have no right,"
she used to say, " to inflict the annoyance of my
pleasures upon my servants, and therefore I attend
to my birds and their requirements myself." She
emphasizes her words as she sits at work, stitching
in the long colored threads with extra point as she
speaks, or again, when she is interested in what she
196 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
says, putting down her tapestry and looking straight
into your face, as she explains her meaning directly
and clearly, and without fear of being misunder-
stood. I once complained to her of something said
by some one else. " I do not care what any one
thinks of me, or chooses to say of me " I can al-
most hear her speak ; " nay, more than that, I do
not care what any one chooses to say of the peo-
ple I love ; it does not in any way affect the truth.
People are at liberty to speak what they choose,
and I am also at liberty not to care one farthing
for what they say nor for any mistakes that they
make." What Mrs. Kemble did care for, scrupu-
lously, with infinite solicitude, was the fear of hav-
ing ever caused pain by anything that she had said
in the energy of the moment ; she would remem-
ber it and think over it after days had passed.
People did not always understand her, nor how
her love of the truth, as it appeared to her, did
not prevent her tenderness for the individual ; she
would also take it for granted that whoever it was
she was talking to also preferred the truth to any
adaptation of it. Her stories of the past were end-
lessly interesting and various. She had known ev-
erybody of interest. She had always detested ba-
nalities, preferring silence to commonplace. Even as
a girl she seems to have gone to the root of things,
and made others speak from their hearts. Her pa-
MRS. KEMBLE 197
thetic story of Mary Shelley haunts one with the
saddest persistence, and seems to sigh back the cur-
tain of the past. " Bring up a boy to think for him-
self," she as a girl once said to Mrs. Shelley; and to
this came the mother's passionate reply, " Ah ! no,
no ; bring him up to think like other people."
Mr. Henry James instances among her social
gifts her extraordinary power of calling up the
representation of that which was in her mind, and
impressing others with her own impression. Those,
he says, who sometimes went with her to the play
in the last years of her life will remember the Juli-
ets, the Beatrices, the Rosalinds, whom she could
still make vivid without any accessory except the
surrounding London uproar.
I myself fortunately once happened to ask her
some question concerning "As You Like It, "which
had been her sister's favorite play. Suddenly, as
if by a miracle, her little room seemed transformed;
there were the actors, not even actors ; there stood
Rosalind and Celia themselves, there stood the
Duke, there was Orlando in the life and spirit.
One spoke and then another, Rosalind pleading,
the stern Duke unrelenting ; then we were some-
how carried to the Forest, with its depths and its
delightful company. It all lasted but a few mo-
ments, and there was Mrs. Kemble again sitting in
her chair in her usual corner ; and yet I cannot to
198 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
this day realize that the whole beautiful mirage did
not sweep through the little room, with color and
light and emotion, and the rustling of trees, and the
glittering of embroidered draperies.
Mrs. Kemble told me that she herself had only
once heard her aunt Mrs. Siddons read. She said
the impression was very overpowering, though she
had been almost a child at the time. It was from
the witches' scene in " Macbeth " that Mrs. Siddons
read. She was very old and broken at the time,
and living in retirement ; but she forgot her suffer-
ing state in her theme. The sense of storm and
mystery and power was all round about, Mrs. Kem-
ble said. One can imagine the scene, the dark-eyed
maiden sitting at the feet of the great actress and
receiving the initiation from her failing hands.
The true dramatic faculty does not indeed de-
pend on footlights, or on a stage ; it is a special
gift from spirit to spirit. Fanny Kemble was al-
most the very last representative of the ruling race
to which she belonged, and in no small degree 'did
she retain to the very end their noble gift of illumi-
nation, of giving life to words and feelings. She
herself has defined this power. " Things dramatic
and things theatrical are often confounded togeth-
er " she writes. " English people, being for the
most part neither one nor the other, speak as if
they were identical, instead of so dissimilar that they
MRS. KEMBLE 199
are nearly opposite. That which is dramatic in hu-
man nature is the passionate, emotional, humorous
element, the simplest portion of our composition ;
that which imitates it is its theatrical reproduction.
The dramatic is the real of which the theatrical is
the false. A combination of the power," she con-
tinues, " of representing passion and emotion with
that of imagining or conceiving it is essential to
make a good actor ; their combination in the high-
est degree alone makes a great one."
I remember Mrs. Sartoris once saying: "I do not
know if you will think it very conceited of me ; but
it always seems to me that no one I ever talk to
seems able to say anything clearly and to the point,
except myself and my sister Fanny. When she
speaks I know exactly what she means and wants
to say; when other people speak, I have to find out
what they mean, and even then I am not certain
that they know it themselves." As Mrs. Sartoris
spoke she looked at me with her searching glance ;
her beautiful head was like that of some classical
statue nobly set upon her shoulders. But no clas-
sical statue ever looked at you as she did ; her eyes
and mouth spoke before she uttered. She always
seemed to me an improvisatrice. Both these wom-
en had the rare power of stirring and stimulating
one's sleepy makeshift soul, suggesting, satisfying.
It was as if Mrs. Sartoris could at will compel the
200 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
sound and the sense and the color into that in
which she was interested, so that we were all for
the time, and indeed for a lifetime since, illumined
by her.
Mrs. Sartoris was living in Paris in the Rue Roy-
ale, at one time, in a very stately apartment. It
seemed to suit her, as did all handsome and beauti-
ful things. I don't suppose the modern aesthetic
taste would have suited her. She liked glorious
things full of color, Italian, sumptuous, and she
liked them used for daily life and pleasure. She
made a home out of her lovely bric-a-brac and ta-
pestries and cabinets. Something, of course, must
be allowed for the grateful excitement of inexperi-
ence ; but to us in those days her houses seemed
like succeeding paradises upon earth. I can re-
member on one occasion gazing in admiration at
a glowing shaded lamp, the first I had ever seen,
reflected from one glass to another, and listening
to my hostess as she sang Oberon's " Mermaid
Song," from the far end of the room. Then came
dinner in an octagon dining-room at a round table
with pink wax candles and ices, and then a quick
drive to the theatre where our stalls were kept for
us. I remember neither the name of the theatre
nor of the play, only the look of the bright lighted
stage, and the pretty white house full of spectators.
Mrs. Sartoris was using a pair of turquoise eye-
MRS. KEMBLE 2OI
glasses, through which she looked about, and pres-
ently she whispered to me, "There, to your left, in
the box on the first tier." I looked, expecting I
know not what, and my first impression was disap-
pointment. I saw some figures in the box two
men standing at the back, and a lady in a front seat
sitting alone. She was a stout middle-aged wom-
an, dressed in a stiff watered-silk dress, with a huge
cameo, such as people then wore, at her throat.
Her black shiny hair shone like polished ebony ;
she had a heavy red face, marked brows, great
dark eyes ; there was something how shall I say
it? rather fierce, defiant, and set in her appear-
ance, powerful, sulky ; she frightened one a little.
" That is George Sand," said Mrs. Sartoris, bend-
ing her head and making a friendly sign to the
lady with her eyeglasses. The figure also bent its
head, but I don't remember any smile or change
of that fixed expression. The contrast struck me
the more, for my hostess, as I have said, scarcely
needed to speak to make herself understood ; her
whole countenance spoke for her even if she was
silent. George Sand looked half -bored, half -far-
away ; she neither lighted up nor awoke into greet-
ing.*
* I like better to think of George Sand as I never saw her, with
gray hairs and a softened life, outcoming and helpful, and living in
later years among her plants and her grandchildren and her poor
people ; to imagine her as I have heard her described in her age,
202 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
Mrs. Kemble once said she had heard George
Sand described half in fun as " unamiable, very em-
phatic, very dictatorial very like herself, in short";
but perhaps the description was as superficial in
one case as it assuredly would have been in the
other.
Mrs. Kemble was dramatic rather than dictato-
rial. Her selection of facts was curiously partial
and even biassed; not so her uncompromising sense
of their moral value. When she sat with her watch
open before her, reading, writing, working to rule,
it was because time itself was of importance, in her
eyes, rather than her work. For her, life belonged
to time, rather than time to life. " Do you think
I could have borne with my life if I had not lived
by rule," she used to say. She carried her love of
method into everything, even into the game of pa-
tience with which she amused herself. Evening
after evening the table would be set and the ap-
pointed number of games would be played con-
scientiously, as she sat, whether she was tired or
not, inclined or not, as a beloved enchantress deal-
ing out past destinies to the pasteboard men and
women on the table before her. Mrs. Kemble once
beneficent, occupied, tending and prescribing, distributing the sim-
ples out of her garden, healing the sick, softened by time, giving to
others day by day what she had earned by her nights of persistent
work.
MRS. KEMBLE 203
sent over for a neighbor to teach him patience;
one might moralize over the combination Mrs.
Kemble teaching patience in her grand -seigneur
fashion, and meekly subservient to its laws ! It was
indeed because she was so conscious of passionate
interests and diversities that she tried to shape her
life to one recurring pattern. A friend recalls an
anecdote of Frederika Bremer, who was not willing
to see Mrs. Kemble on one occasion, explaining
afterwards, " I could not see so many people as
you are when I had a headache." She was indeed
many people actors and musicians, philosophers,
teachers, and poets in one. She was eighty before
she attempted a novel, but her letters are models,
especially the earlier ones. Her poems are very
lovely. Her farewell to the Alps was written after
threescore years and ten had passed over her head,
and I heard her read it with tears. Once I asked
her why she so disliked the stage, loving all that
belonged to it as she did. She said that it was be-
cause she loved her own being even more than her
art ; that she found the constant stimulation of
emotion in time destroyed in herself the possibility
of natural feeling, and that she wished to keep the
possession of her own soul ; but I think she has also
written this somewhere in her Records.
Perhaps the most distinguishing stamp of her
character was her great and fervent piety. Her
204 CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS
convictions were very deep ; what she said of her
own religious faith was that it was " invincible, un-
reasoning." I have heard a friend describe how,
as they came along the mountain-pass from Rose-
laui, Mrs. Kemble made her bearers set her down at
the summit of the ascent. " I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills," she said, breaking out into the
words of the psalm, and repeating verse after verse.
She used to go regularly to church when she was in
London, though I do not think any of the steeples
and pulpits which adorn South Kensington exactly
suited the deep and fervent spirit of her faith. She
was neither high church nor low church nor broad
church, and once after witnessing a Catholic cere-
mony, the Fttte Dieu, in some foreign city, she ex-
claimed to her man-servant, " Oh, Covert, what an
amusing religion you have !" But her faith was a
noble one, and her great reverence for what was
good and great seemed to make goodness and great-
ness nearer to us.
Of all possessions, that of the added power which
comes to us through the gifts of others is one of
the most mysterious and most precious. We are in-
adequate in a thousand ways, but the grace is there ;
we are disappointed and inefficient, and yet we can
be happy in a perfection which may be revealed at
any moment, in the twinkling of an eye. It is like
some secret link binding humanity together, some
MRS. KEMBLE 205
fraction of the rainbow hidden among the clouds
and the tears of life.
Mrs. Kemble possessed to a rare degree the gift
of ennobling that to which she turned her mind.
Kindness is comparatively commonplace, but that
divine touch which makes others feel akin to qual-
ities greater than they are conscious of in them-
selves, was, I think, the virtue by which she brought
us all into subjection.
THE END
LITERARY BIOGRAPHIES AND REMINISCENCES
Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning. By ANNE
RITCHIE. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and
Gilt Top, $2 oo.
Boswell'a Life of Johnson, including Boswell's Journal of a
Tour to the Hebrides, and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into
North Wales. Edited by GEORGE BIRKHECK HILL, D.C.L.
6 volumes. Svo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, .$10 oo.
Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Collected and Edited by
GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L. 2 volumes. 8vo, Cloth,
Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $7 50.
The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, D.C.L. Ed-
ited by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. With Portrait. 2 volumes.
Royal Svo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $7 oo ; Sheep,
$8 oo ; Half Calf, $n 50.
Letters of James Russell Lowell. Edited by CHARLES ELIOT
NORTON. With Three Portraits. 2 volumes. Svo, Cloth,
Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $8 oo ; Three-quarter Calf, $12 50.
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1825-1832. From the
Original Manuscript at Abbotsford. With Two Portraits and
Engraved Title-pages. 2 volumes. Svo, Cloth, Uncut Edges
and Gilt Tops, $7 50 ; Half Calf, $12 oo. Popular Edition.
2 volumes in i. Crown Svo, Cloth, $2 50.
Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott.
Edited by Professor W. MINTO. Illustrated. 2 volumes. Svo.
Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $8 oo.
Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oli-
phaiit, his wife. By MARGARET OLIPHAXT W. OLIPHANT.
With Two Photogravure Portraits. 2 volumes. Crown Svo,
Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $7 oo.
A Sketch of the Life and Times of the Rev. Sydney Smith,
M.A. By STUART J. REID. With Steel-plate Portraits, Illus-
trations, and Autograph Letter. Svo, Cloth, $3 oo.
Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne. By HO-
RATIO BRIDGE. Illustrated. i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.
The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Edward Bul-
wer, Lord Lytton. By his Son, the EARL OF LYTTON (" Owen
Meredith"). Volume I. (containing Vols. I. and II. of the
English Edition). Illustrated. 121110, Cloth, 2 75.
2 Literary Biographies ana Reminiscences
The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew,
GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, M. P. With Portrait on Steel.
Library Edition. 2 volumes. Svo, Cloth, Uncut Edges arid
Gilt Tops, $5 oo ; Sheep, $6 oo ; Half Calf, $9 50. Popular
Edition. Complete in i volume, I2mo, Cloth, $i 75.
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Prepared
for Publication by THOMAS CARLYLE. Edited by JAMES AN-
THONY FROUDE. I2mo, Cloth, $i oo.
Life of Thomas Carlyle. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.
2 volumes. Illustrated. I2mo, Cloth, $i oo each.
Thomas Carlyle. By M. D. CONWAY. Illustrated. i2mo,
Cloth, $i ob.
What I Remember. By THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. 2
volumes. I2mo, Cloth, $i 75 each.
Memoirs of a Man of the World. Fifty Years of London Life.
By EDMUND YATES. With Portrait. i2mo, Cloth, $i 75.
An Autobiography. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. With Portrait.
I2mo, Cloth, $r 25.
Some Literary Recollections. By JAMES PAYN. With Por-
trait. I2ino, Cloth, $i oo.
Charles Reade, D.C.L. , Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist. By
CHARLES L. READE, and the Rev. COMPTON READE. With
Portrait. I2mo, Cloth, $i 25.
George Eliot's Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals.
Arranged and Edited by her Husband J. W. CROSS. Portraits
and Illustrations. In 3 volumes. Library Edition, I2ino, Cloth,
$3 75 ; Half Calf, $9 oo. Popular Edition, I2mo, Cloth, $2 25.
Special Edition in 3 volumes, Half Cloth Binding, $2 oo.
Autobiography of Sir Henry Taylor, 1800-1875. With Por-
trait. 2 volumes. Svo, Cloth, $3 oo.
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
^" The above ivorks are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the pub-
lishers, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Lanada, or
Mexico, on receipt of the price.
UC SOUT
HERN REGIONAL LIBRARY AC LTV
A 001417538 4
BREVTAN'O's