Records of a Girlhood

Monday, July 18th.—The theater was crowded to-night, which delighted me. It is pleasant to see malicious and evil actions produce such a result. I was very nervous and excited, and nearly went into hysterics over one small incident of the evening. At the close of the first separation scene—the play was "Venice Preserved"—when Jaffier is carried out by the nape of the neck by Pierre, and Belvidera extracted on the other side in the arms (and iron ones they were) of Bedamar, the audience of course were affected, harrowed, overcome by the poignant pathos of the situation. Charles looked woebegone. I called upon him in tones of the most piercing anguish (an agony not entirely feigned, as my bruises can bear witness). The curtain descended slowly amidst sympathetic sobs and silence—the musicians themselves, deeply moved, no doubt, with the sorrows of the scene, mournfully resumed their fiddles, and struck up "ti ti tum tiddle un ti tum ti"—the jolliest jig you ever heard. The bathos was irresistible; we behind the scenes, the principal sufferers (perhaps) in the night's performance, were instantly comforted, and all but shouted with laughter. I hope the audience were equally revived by this grotesque sudden cheering of their spirits. After the tragedy a Bristolian Paganini performed a concerto on one string. Dall declares that the whole orchestra played the whole time—but some sounds reached me in my dressing-room that were decidedly unique more ways than one, not at all unlike our favorite French fantasia—"Complainte d'un cochon au lait qui rêve." But the audience were transported; they clapped and the fiddle squeaked, they shouted and the fiddle squealed, they hurrahed and the fiddle uttered three terrific screams, and it was over and Paganini is done for—here, at any rate. He need never show face or fiddle here; he hasn't a string (even one) left to his bow in Bristol. "So Orpheus fiddled," etc.

Tuesday, July 19th.—Dinner-party at the – which ought to have been chronicled by Jane Austen. I sat by a gentleman who talked to me of the hanging gardens of Semiramis and what might have been cultivated therein (hemp perhaps), then of the derivation of languages—he still kept among roots—and finally of tea, which he told me he was endeavoring to grow on the Welsh mountains. Some of the table-talk deserved printing verbatim, only it was almost too good to be true, or at any rate believed.

Wednesday, July 20th.—Charles Mason came after breakfast, and told us that there was some chance of poor Mr. Brunton's getting out of prison (into which his creditor has thrust him), for that the latter had been so universally scouted for his harsh proceeding that he probably would be shamed into liberating him.

We shall not leave Bristol to-day. The wind is contrary and the weather quite unfavorable for a party of pleasure, which our trip by sea to Ilfracombe was to be. It's very disagreeable living half in one's trunks and traveling-bags, as this sort of uncertainty compels one to do. I studied Dante, wrote verses and sketched, and tried to be busy; but a defeated departure leaves one's mind and thoughts only half unpacked, and I felt idle and unsettled, though I worked at "The Star of Seville" till dinner-time.

After dinner I studied politics in the Examiner and read an article on Cobbett, which made me laugh, and the motto to which might have been "Malvolio, thou art sick of self-conceit." …

Thursday, July 21st.—At dinner a discussion, suggested by Mr. D–'s conduct to Mr. Brunton, on the subject of returning evil for evil, and the difficulty of not doing so, if not deliberately and in deed, upon impulse and by thought. Nothing is easier in such matters than to say what one would do, and nothing, I suppose, more difficult than to do what one should do. So God keep us all from convenient opportunities of revenging ourselves....

[Occasionally one hears in the streets voices in which the making of a fortune lies, and when one remembers what fortunes some voices have commanded, it seems bitterly cruel to think of such a possession begging its bread for want of the chance that might have made it available by culture. A woman, some years ago, used to sing at night in the neighborhood of St. James's Street, whose voice was so exquisite, so powerful, sweet, and thrilling, a mezzo soprano of such pure tone and vibrating quality, that Lady Essex, my sister, and myself, at different times, struck by the woman's magnificent gift and miserable position, had her into our houses, to hear her sing and see if nothing could be done to give her the full use of her noble natural endowment. She was a plain young woman of about thirty, tolerably decently dressed, and with a quiet, simple manner. She said her husband was a house-paperer in a small way, and when he was out of employment she used to go out in the evening and see what her singing would bring her. Poor thing! it was impossible to do anything for her; she was too old to learn or unlearn anything. No training could have corrected the low cockney vulgarity and coarse, ignorant indistinctness and incorrectness of her enunciation. And so in after years, as I returned repeatedly to England, after longer or shorter intervals of time, and always inhabited the same neighborhood in London, I still continued to hear, on dark drizzly evenings (and never without a thrill of poignant pain and pity) this angel's voice wandering in the muddy streets, its perfect, round, smooth edge becoming by degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness—the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while every now and then one or two lovely, rich, pathetic notes, surviving ruin, recalled the early sweetness and power of the original instrument. The idea of what that woman's voice might have been to her used to haunt me.

It was hearing Rachel singing (barefoot) in the streets of Paris that Jules Janin's attention was first excited by her. Her singing, as I heard it on the stage in the drinking song of the extraordinary piece called "Valeria," in which she played two parts, was really nothing more than a chanting in the deep contralto of her speaking voice, and could hardly pass for a musical performance at all, any more than her wonderful uttering of the "Marseillaise," with which she made the women's blood run cold, and the men's hair stand on end, and everybody's flesh creep.

My sister and I used often to plan an expedition of street-singing for the purpose of seeing how much we could collect in that way for some charity. We were to put ourselves in "poor and mean attire"—I do not know that we were to "smirch our faces" with brown paint; we thought large battered poke-bonnets would answer the purpose, and, thus disguised, we were to go the rounds of the club windows, my father walking at a discreet distance for our protection on one side of the street, and our formidable pirate friend Trelawney on the other. We never carried out this project, though I have no doubt it would have brought us a very pretty penny for any endowment we might have wished to make.]

Friday, July 22d.—Long and edifying talk with dear Dall upon my prospects in marrying. "While you remain single," says she, "and choose to work, your fortune is an independent and ample one; as soon as you marry, there's no such thing. Your position in society," says she, "is both a pleasanter and more distinguished one than your birth or real station entitles you to; but that also is the result of your professional exertions, and might, and probably would, alter for the worse if you left the stage; for, after all, it is mere frivolous fashionable popularity." I ought to have got up and made her a courtesy for that. So that it seems I have fortune and fame (such as it is)—positive real advantages, which I cannot give with myself, and which I cease to own when I give myself away, which certainly makes my marrying any one or any one marrying me rather a solemn consideration; for I lose everything, and my marryee gains nothing in a worldly point of view—says she—and it's incontrovertible and not pleasant. So I took up Dante, and read about devils boiled in pitch, which refreshed my imagination and cheered my spirits very much.

[How far my ingenious mind was from foreseeing the days when men of high rank and social station would marry singers, dancers, and actresses, and be condescending enough to let their wives continue to earn their bread by public exhibition, and even to appropriate the proceeds of their theatrical labors! I have not yet made up my mind whether, in these cases, the gentleman ought not to take his wife's name in private, as a compensation for her not taking his in public. Poor Miss Paton's noble husband was the only Englishman, that I know of, who committed that act of self-effacement. To go much further back in dramatic and social history, the old, accomplished, mad Earl of Peterborough married the famous singer Anastasia Robinson, and refused to acknowledge the fact till her death. To be sure, this was a more cowardly, but a less dirty meanness. He withheld his name from her, but did not take her money.]

It is settled now that we go to Exeter by coach, and now that we have given up our pretty sea trip to Ilfracombe, the weather has become lovely—perverse creature!—but I am glad we are going away in every way.

Saturday, Bristol, July 23d. … We started at eight, and taking the whole coach to ourselves as we do, I think traveling by a public conveyance the best mode of getting over the road. They run so rapidly; there is so little time lost, and so much trouble with one's luggage saved. The morning was gray and soft and promised a fine day, but broke its promise at the end of our second stage, and began to pelt with rain, which it continued to do the live-long blessed day. We could see, however, that the country we were passing through was charming. One or two of the cottages by the roadside, half-smothered in vine and honeysuckle, reminded me of Lady Juliana,2 who, when she said she could live in a desert with her lover, thought that it was a "sort of place full of roses." … These laborers' cottages were certainly the poor dwellings of very poor people, but there was nothing unsightly, repulsive, or squalid about them—on the contrary, a look of order, of tidy neatness about the little houses, that added the peculiarly English element of comfort and cleanliness to the picturesqueness of their fragrant festoons of flowery drapery, hung over them by the sweet season. The little plots of flower-garden one mass of rich color; the tiny strip of kitchen-garden, well stocked and trimly kept, beside it; the thriving fruitful orchard stretching round the whole; and beyond, the rich cultivated land rolling its waving corn-fields, already tawny and sunburnt, in mellow contrast with the smooth green pasturages, with their deep-shadowed trees and bordering lines of ivied hawthorn hedgerows, marking boundary-lines of division without marring the general prospect—a lovely landscape that sang aloud of plenty, industry, and thrift. I wonder if any country is more blessed of God than this precious little England? I think it is like one of its own fair, nobly blooming, vigorous women; her temper—that's the climate—not perfection, to be sure (but, after all, the old praise of it is true; it admits of more constant and regular out-of-door exercise than any other); the religion it professes, pure; the morality it practises, pure, probably by comparison with that of other powerful and wealthy nations. Oh, I trust that neither reform nor its extreme, revolution, will have power to injure this healthily, heartily constituted land....

Exeter, July 24th, 1831.

Dearest H–,

We arrived here last night, or rather evening, at half-past six o'clock, and I found your letter, which, having waited for me, shall not wait for my answer....

Thank you for John's translation of the German song, the original of which I know and like very much. The thoughts it suggested to you must constantly arise in all of us. I believe that in these matters I feel all that you do, but not with the same intensity. To adore is most natural to the mind contemplating beauty, might, and majesty beyond its own powers; to implore is most natural to the heart oppressed with suffering, or agitated with hopes that it cannot accomplish, or fears from which it cannot escape. The difference between natural and revealed religion is that the one worships the loveliness and power it perceives, and the other the goodness, mercy, and truth in which it believes. The one prays for exemption from pain and enjoyment of happiness for body and mind in this present existence; the other for deliverance from spiritual evils, or the possession of spiritual graces, by which the soul is fitted for that better life toward which it tends....

I do not think "Juliet" has written to you hitherto, and I am rather affronted at your calling me so. I have little or no sympathy with, though much compassion for, that Veronese young person.... There is but one sentiment of hers that I can quote with entire self-application, and that is—

"I have no joy of this contract to-night;It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden."

In spite of which the foolish child immediately secures her lover's word, appoints the time for meeting, and makes every arrangement for following up the declaration she thought too sudden by its as sudden execution. Poor Juliet! I am very sorry for her, but do not like to be called after her, and do not think I am like her. I have been working very hard every day since you left Bristol (my belief is that Juliet was very idle). I am sorry to say I find my playing very hard work; but easy work, if there is such a thing, would not be best for me just now.

Yours ever,F. A. K.

Sunday, Exeter.—To church with Dall and my father, a blessing that I can never enjoy in London, where he is all but stared out of countenance if he shows his countenance in a church, and it requires more devotion to the deed than I fear he possesses to encounter the annoyance attendant upon it. We heard an excellent sermon, earnest, sober, simple, which I was especially grateful for on my father's account. Women don't mind bad preaching; they have a general taste for sermons, and, like children with sweeties, will swallow bad ones if they cannot get good. "We have a natural turn for religion," as A.F. said of me; but men, I think, get a not unnatural turn against it when they hear it ill advocated....

The day has been lovely, and from my perch among the clouds here I am looking down upon a lovely view. Following the irregular line of buildings of the street, the eye suddenly becomes embowered in a thick rich valley of foliage, beyond which a hill rises, whose sides are covered with ripening corn-fields, meadows of vivid green, and fields where the rich red color of the earth contrasts beautifully with the fresh hedgerows and tall, dark elm trees, whose shadows have stretched themselves for evening rest down in the low rosy sunset. It is all still and bright, and the Sabbath bells come up to me over it all with intermitting sweetness, like snatches of an interrupted angels' chorus, floating hither and thither about the earth.

Monday.—We contrived to get some saddle-horses, and rode out into the beautiful country round Exeter, but the preface to our poem was rather dry prose. We rode for about an hour between powdery hedges all smothered in dust, up the steepest of hills, and under the hottest of suns; but we had our reward when we halted at the top, and looked down upon a magnificent panorama of land and water, hill and dale, broad smiling meadows, and dark shadowy woodland—a vast expanse of various beauty, over which the eye wandered and paused in slow contentment. As we came leisurely down the opposite side of the hill, we met a gypsy woman, and I reined up my horse and listened to my fortune: "I have a friend abroad who is very fond of me." I hope so. "I have a relation far abroad who is very fond of me too." I know so. "I shall live long." More is the pity. "I shall marry and have three children." Quite enough. "I shall take easily to love, but it will not break my heart." I am glad to hear that. "I shall cross the sea before I see London again." Ah! I am afraid not. "The end of my summer will be happier than its beginning"—and that may very easily be. For that I gave my prophetess a shilling. Oh, Zingarella! my blessing on your black eyes and red-brown cheeks! May you have spoken true!…

Meantime, my companions, my father and Mr. Kean, were discussing the fortunes of Poland. If I were a man, with a hundred thousand pounds at my disposal, I would raise a regiment and join the Poles. The Russians have been beaten again, which is good hearing. Is it possible this cause should fall to the earth? On our way home, had a nice smooth, long canter by the river-side. We turned off our road to visit a pretty property of Mr. F–'s, the house half-way up a hill, prettily seated among pleasant woods. We galloped up some fields above it to the brow of the rise, and had three mouthfuls of delicious fresh breeze, and a magnificent view of Exeter and the surrounding country.... After dinner, off to the theater; it was my benefit, "The Gamester." The house was very full, and I played and looked well; but what a Stukely! I was afraid my eyes would scarcely answer my purpose, but that I should have been obliged to "employer l'effort de mon bras" to keep him at a proper distance. What ruffianly wooing! and not one of the actors knew their parts. Stukely said to me in his love-speech, "Time has not gathered the roses from your cheeks, though often washed them." I had heard of Time as the thinner of people's hair, but never as the washer of their faces.

Sunday, July 31st.—Went to church, to St. Sidwell's.... We had another good sermon; that preacher must be a good man, and I should like to know him....

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss Austen's novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like, which is Irish.... How many things one ought to die of and doesn't! That dinner did come to an end. In the drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a nightmare. As we were taking our departure, and had got half way down the stairs, a general rush was made at us, and an attempt, upon some pretext, to get us back into that dreadful drawing-room. I thought of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to escape back again into the boiling pitch. But we got away and safe home, and leave Exeter to-morrow.

Exeter, July 31, 1831.

Dearest H–,

I am content to be whatever does not militate against your affection for me.... I had a long letter from dear A–, a day ago, from Weybridge. She is quite well, and says my mother is as happy as the day is long, now she is once more in her beloved haunts. I love Weybridge too very much.... It seems to me that memory is the special organ of pain, for even when it recalls our pleasures, it recalls only the past, and half their sweetness becomes bitter in the process. I have a tenacious and acute memory, and, as the phrenologists affirm, no hope, and feel disposed to lament that, not having both, I have either. The one seems the necessary counterpoise of the other; the one is the source of most of the pain, as the other is of most of the pleasure, which we derive from the things that are not; and I feel daily more and more my deficiency in the more cheerful attribute....

You have been to the Opera, and seen what even one's imagination does not shrug its shoulders at; I mean Madame Pasta. I admire her perfectly, and she seems to me perfect. How I wish I had been with you! And yet I cannot fancy you in the Opera House; it is a sort of atmosphere that I find it difficult to think of your breathing.... I wish you had not asked me to write verses for you upon that picture of Haydon's "Bonaparte at St. Helena." Of course, I know it familiarly through the engraving, and, in spite of its sunshine, what a shudder and chill it sends to one's heart! It is very striking, but I have neither the strength nor concentrativeness requisite for writing upon it. The simplicity of its effect is what makes it so fine; and any poetry written upon it would probably fail to be as simple, and therefore as powerful, as itself. I cannot even promise you to attempt it, but if ever I fall in with a suitable frame of mind for so bold an experiment, I will remember you and the rocks of St. Helena. "My lady" (an Italian portrait on which I had written some verses) "Mia Donna," or "Madonna," more properly to speak, was a most beautiful Italian portrait that I saw, not in Augustin's gallery, but in a small collection of pictures belonging to Mr. Day, and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Sir Thomas Lawrence told me when I described it to him, that he thought it was a painting of Giordano's. It was a lovely face, not youthful in its character of beauty; there is a calm seriousness about the brow and forehead, a clear, intellectual severity about the eye, and a sweet, still placidity round the mouth, that united, to my fancy, all the elements of beauty, physical, mental, and moral. What an incomparable friend that woman must have been! Why is it that we rejoice that a soul fit for heaven is constrained to tarry here, but that, in truth, the fittest for this is also the fittest for that life? For it seems to me more natural not to wish to detain the bright spirit from its brighter home, and not to sorrow at the decree which calls it hence to perfect its excellence in higher spheres of duty....

I think a blight of uncertainty must have pervaded the atmosphere when I was born, and penetrated, not certainly my nature, but my whole earthly destiny, with its influence; from my plans and projects for to-morrow on to those of next year, all is mist and indistinct indecision. I suppose it is the trial that suits my temper least, and therefore fits it best. It surely is that which "willfulness, conceit, and egotism" find hardest to endure. Yesterday I determined so far to escape from, or cheat, my destiny as to have a peep into futurity by the help of a gypsy. Riding with my father, and the whole hour, time, day, and scene, were in admirable harmony: the dark, sunburnt face, with its bright, laughing eyes and coal-black curls and flashing teeth; the old gateway against which she was leaning; the blue summer sky and sunny road skirted with golden corn-fields—the whole picture in which she was set was charming.

"I know it is a sin to be a mocker;"

and I am sure I need not tell you that I am sincerely grateful for all the kindness and civility that is bestowed upon us wherever we go.... What with riding, rehearsing, and acting, my days are completely filled. We start for Plymouth to-morrow at eight, and act "Romeo and Juliet" in the evening, which is rather laborious work. We play there every night next week. When next I write I will tell you of our further plans, which are at this moment still uncertain....

Affectionately yours,F. A. K.

[These were the days before railroads had run everything and everybody up to London. There were still to be found then, in various parts of England, life that was peculiar and provincial, and manners that had in them a character of their own and a stamp of originality that had often quite as much to attract as to repel. Men and women are, of course, still the same that sat to that enchanting painter, Jane Austen, but the whole form and color and outward framing and various countenance of their lives have merged its distinctiveness in a commonplace conformity to universal custom; and in regard to the more superficial subjects of her fine and gentle satire, if she were to return among us she would find half her occupation gone.]

Monday, August 1st.—I got some books while waiting for the coach, and we started at half-past eight. The heat was intolerable and the dust suffocating, but the country through which we passed was lovely. For a long time we drove along the brow of a steep hill. The valley was all glorious with the harvest: corn-fields with the red-gold billows yet untouched by the sickle; others full of sunburnt reapers sweeping down the ripe ears; others, again, silent and deserted, with the tawny sheaves standing, bound and dry, upon the bristling stubble, on the ground over which they rippled and nodded yesterday, a great rolling sea of burnished grain. All over the sunny landscape peace and prosperity smiled, and gray-steepled churches and red-roofed villages, embowered in thick protecting shade, seemed to beckon the eye to rest as it wandered over the charming prospect. The white-walled mansions of the lords of the land glittered from the verdant shelter of their surrounding plantations, and the thirsty cattle, beautiful in color and in grouping, stood in pools in the deeper parts of the brooks, where some giant tree threw its shadow over the water and the smooth sheltered sward round its feet. In spite of this charming prospect I was very sad, and the purple heather bordering the road, with its thick tufts, kept suggesting Weybridge and the hours I had lately spent there so happily.... To shake myself I took up "Adam Blair;" and, good gracious! what a shaking it did give me! What a horrible book! And how could D– have recommended me to read it? It is a very fine and powerful piece of work, no doubt; but I turned from it with infinite relief to "Quentin Durward." Walter Scott is quite exciting enough for wholesome pleasure; there is no poison in anything that he has ever written: for how many hours of harmless happiness the world may bless him!