Records of a Girlhood

Lady Francis and Mrs. Sullivan called in the afternoon; I was feeling miserable, and exhausted with my rehearsal. In the evening I helped my mother to move all the furniture, which I think is nothing in the world but a restless indication of her anxiety about my father; it is the fourth time since she same back from the country.

Tuesday, December 1st.– … It seems that in the arrangement, whatever it may be, which has taken place between the actors and the management, Mr. Harley and Mr. Egerton are the only ones who have declined the proposed accommodation. Young has behaved like an angel, offering to play for nothing till Christmas; how kind and liberal he is! Mr. Abbott, Mr. Duraset, Mr. Ward, and all the others, have been as considerate and generous as possible. But the thing is doomed, and will go to the ground, in spite of every effort that can be made to stave the ruin off.

I was greeted this morning, when I came down to breakfast, with a question that surprised and amused we very much. "Pray, Fanny," said John, "did you ever thank Mr. Bacon (one of the editors of the Times) for his book (the "Life of Francis I." which Mr. Bacon had been kind enough to send me); for here is a very abusive critique in to-day's Times of the play last night." "Well," thought I, "that's a comical sequitur, and a fine estimate of criticism;" but the conclusion was droller still. I had not forgotten to thank the friendly author for his book, nor had he written the article in question; but it seems a young gentleman, much in love with Miss Phillips (a promising and very handsome young actress at Drury Lane), had found pulling me to pieces the easiest way of showing his admiration for her. That is not a very exalted style of criticism either, but it is just as well that one should occasionally know what the praise and blame one receives may be worth. It seems that when it was determined that Miss Sheriff should come out, Mr. Welsh, whose pupil she was, made a great feast, and invited two-and-twenty gentlemen connected with the press to a private hearing of her.... In the evening, we all went to hear her, being every way much interested in her success. John and Henry went into the front of the house; my mother, Dr. Moore (the Rev. Dr. Moore, a great friend of my father and mother's), and myself, went up to our own box. The house was crammed, the pit one black, crowded mass. Poor child! I turned as cold as ice as the symphony of "Fair Aurora" (the opera was "Artaxerxes") began, and she came forward with Mr. Wilson. The bravos, the clapping, the noise, the great sound of popular excitement overpowering in all its manifestations; and the contrast between the sense of power conveyed by the acclamations of a great concourse of people, and the weakness of the individual object of that demonstration, gave me the strangest sensation when I remembered my own experience, which I had not seen. When I saw the thousands of eyes of that crowded pitful of men, and heard their stormy acclamations, and then looked at the fragile, helpless, pretty young creature standing before them trembling with terror, and all woman's fear and shame in such an unnatural position, I more than ever marveled how I, or any woman, could ever have ventured on so terrible a trial, or survived the venture. It seemed to me as if the mere gaze of all that multitude must melt the slight figure away like a wreath of vapor in the sun, or shrivel it up like a scrap of silver paper before a blazing fire. It made poor Dr. Moore and myself both cry, but there was a deal more sympathy in my tears than in his; for I had known the dizzy terror of that moment, had felt the ground slide from under my feet and the whole air become a sea of fiery rings before my swimming eyes. Besides my fellow-feeling for her actual agony, I had one for what her after trials may be, and I hoped for her that she might be able to see the truth of all things in the midst of all things false; and then, if she takes pleasure in her gilded toys, she will not have too bitter a heartache when they are broken. She sang well, and soon recovered from her fright, which, even from the first, did not affect her voice. She is rather pretty, but does not walk or move gracefully; she was well dressed, all but her hair, which was dressed in the present frizzy French fashion, and looked ridiculous for Mandane. Her singing was good, of a good style; I do not mean only that she sang "Fly, soft ideas, fly," and "Monster away!" and "The Soldier Tired," brilliantly, because they do not test the best singing, but the soave sostenuto of her "If e'er the cruel tyrant love," and "Let not rage thy bosom firing," were specimens of the best and most difficult school of singing. They were flowing, smooth, soft, and sweet, without trick or device of mere florid ornamentation, and were as intrinsically good in her execution as they are admirable in that peculiar style of composition. Her shake is not genuine, and some of her rapid descending scales want finish and accuracy; her use of her arms and her gestures were very pretty and graceful, and we were all greatly pleased with her. Braham was magnificently great, in spite of his inches. What a noble artist he is! and with what wonderful vigor he acts through his singing! being no actor at all the moment he stops singing. Wilson sang out of tune; the music is not in his voice, and he was frightened. Miss Cawse was rather a dumpy Artaxerxes, which is an impertinent remark for me to make; she has a beautiful contralto voice. The opera went off brilliantly, and after it the audience called for "God Save the King," which was performed. Paganini was in the box opposite to us; what a cadaverous-looking creature he is! Came home and saw my father, and gave him the report of Miss Sheriff's success....

Friday, December 2d.– … I went to see Cecilia Siddons; I thought her looking aged and thin, and Mrs. Wilkinson (Mrs. Siddons's companion for many years previous to her death) looking sad and ill too. They have both lost the one idea of their whole lives.

Saturday, 3d.– … It seems the doctors recommend my father's going to Brighton. I was urging him to do so this morning.... After tea I looked on the map for Rhodez, the scene of that horrible Fualdes tragedy (a murder the commission of which involved some singular and terribly dramatic incidents). I read Daru's "History of Venice" till bedtime.

Sunday, December 4th.– … My father, for the first time this fortnight, was able to dine with us. After dinner I read the whole trial of Bishop and Williams, and their confession. My mother is reading aloud to us Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Life.

Great Russell Street, December 4, 1831.

Dear H–,

It is at the sensible hour of a quarter-past twelve at night that I begin this immense sheet of paper, and with the sensible purpose of filling it before I go to bed.... What an unsatisfactory invention letter-writing is, to be sure; and yet there is none better for the purpose. When you asked me so affectionately in your letter whether I was going to bed, I concluded naturally that you were writing to me instead of doing so yourself; but I received the letter at half-past nine in the morning, when I was getting ready to ride. This sort of epistolary cross-questions and crooked answers is sometimes droll, but oftener sad: we weep with those who did weep, when they have dried their eyes; and rejoice with those who did rejoice, but the corners of whose mouths are already drawn down for crying, while we fancy we are smiling sympathetically with them.... You ask me how the world goes with me, and I can only say round, as I suppose it does with everybody. All goes on precisely as usual with me; my life is exceedingly uniform, and it is seldom that anything occurs to disturb its monotonous routine. My dear father, thank Heaven, is better, but still very weak, and I fear it will be yet some time before he recovers his strength. He came down to dinner to-day for the first time in this fortnight; indeed, it is only since the day before yesterday that he has left his bed; but I trust that this attack will serve him for a long time, and that with rest and quiet he will regain his strength.

I am really glad my aunt Kemble is better, though I remember having some not unpleasant ideas as to how, if she were not, you would go to Leamington to nurse her, and so come on and stay with us in London; but I cannot wish it at the price of her prolonged indisposition, poor woman!… I am sorry to say my father is pronounced worse to-day; he has a bad side-ache, and they are applying mustard poultices to overcome it. There is some apprehension of a return of fever. This is a real and terrible anxiety, dear H–. The theater, too, is going on very ill, and he is unable to give it any assistance; and for the same reason I can do nothing for it, for all my plays require him, except Isabella and Fazio, and these are worn threadbare. It is all very gloomy; but, however, time doth not stand still, and will some day come to the end of the journey with us.... You say Undine reminds you of me.... The feeling of an existence more closely allied to the elements of the material universe than even we acknowledge our dust-formed bodies to be, possesses me sometimes almost like a little bit of magnus; bright colors, fleeting lights and shadows, flowers, and above all water, the pure, sparkling, harmonious, powerful element, excite in me a feeling of intimate fellowship, of love, almost greater than any human companionship does. Perhaps, after all, I am only an animated morsel of my palace, this wonderful, beautiful world. Do you not believe in numberless, invisible existences, filling up the vast intermediate distance between God and ourselves, in the lonely and lovely haunts of nature and her more awful and gloomy recesses? It seems as if one must be surrounded by them; I do not mean to the point of merely suggesting the vague "suppose?" that, I should think, must visit every mind; but rather like a consciousness, a conviction, amounting almost to certainty, only short of seeing and hearing. How well I remember in that cedar hall at Oatlands, the sort of invisible presence I used to feel pervading the place. It was a large circle of huge cedar trees in a remote part of the grounds; the paths that led to it were wild and tangled; the fairest flower, the foxglove, grew in tall clumps among the foliage of the thickets and shrubberies that divided the lawn into undulating glades of turf all round it; a sheet of water in which there was a rapid current—I am not sure that it was not the river—ran close by, and the whole place used to affect my imagination in the weirdest way, as the habitation of invisible presences of some strange supernatural order. As the evening came on, I used frequently to go there by myself, leaving our gentlemen at table, and my mother and Lady Francis in the drawing-room. How I flew along by the syringa bushes, brushing their white fragrant blossoms down in showers as I ran, till I came to that dark cedar hall, with its circle of giant trees, whose wide-sweeping branches spread, at it were, a halo of darkness all round it! Through the space at the top, like the open dome of some great circular temple, such as the Pantheon of Rome, the violet-colored sky and its starry worlds looked down. Sometimes the pure radiant moon and one fair attendant star would seem to pause above me in the dark framework of the great tree-tops. That place seemed peopled with spirits to me; and while I was there I had the intensest delight in the sort of all but conscious certainty that it was so. Curiously enough, I never remember feeling the slightest nervousness while I was there, but rather an immense excitement in the idea of such invisible companionship; but as soon as I had emerged from the magic circle of the huge black cedar trees, all my fair visions vanished, and, as though under a spell, I felt perfectly possessed with terror, and rushed home again like the wind, fancying I heard following footsteps all the way I went. The moon seemed to swing to and fro in the sky, and every twisted tree and fantastic shadow that lay in my path made me start aside like a shying horse. I could have fancied they made grimaces and gestures at me, like the rocks and roots in Retsch's etchings of the Brocken; and I used to reach the house with cheeks flaming with nervous excitement, and my heart thumping a great deal more with fear than with my wild run home; and then I walked with the utmost external composure of demure propriety into the drawing-room, as who should say, "Thy servant went no whither," to any inquiry that might be made as to my absence....

It seems to me that you would be a poet but for your analyzing, dissecting, inquiring, and doubting mental tendency. Your truth is not a matter of intuition, but of demonstration; and when you get beyond demonstrability, then nothing remains to you but doubt.... God bless you, dear!

I am yours ever affectionately,F. A. K.

Monday, December 5th.– … My father is worse again to-day. Ohimé! His state is most precarious, and this relapse very alarming. It is dreadful to see him drag himself about, and hear his feeble voice. Oh, my dear, dear Father! Heaven preserve you to us!

Tuesday, 6th.—My father is much worse. How terrible this is!… Dall met me on the stairs this morning, and gave me a miserable account of him; he had just been bled, and that had somewhat relieved him. I went and sat with him while my mother drove out in the carriage. I stayed a long while with him, and he seemed a little better.... My father's two doctors have returned again, and paid him two visits daily. I read Daru all the evening.

Wednesday, 7th.– … So I am to play Belvidera on Monday, and Bianca on Wednesday. That will be hard work; Bianca is terrible.

Thursday, 8th.– … My dear father is beginning to gain strength once more, thank Heaven! I received a letter from Lady Francis about the play (a translation of the French piece of "Henri Trois," by Lord Francis, the production of which at Covent Garden is being postponed in consequence of my father's illness). Poor people! I am sorry for their disappointment.... I devised and tried on a new dress for Bianca; it will be very splendid, but I am afraid I shall look like a metal woman, a golden image. [The dress in question was entirely made of gold tissue; and one evening a man in the pit exclaimed to a friend of mine sitting by him, "Oh! doesn't she look like a splendid gold pheasant?" the possibility of which comparison had not occurred to me, not being a sportsman.]

Friday, 9th.– … I went with my mother to the theater to hear "Fra Diavolo," with which, and Miss Sheriff's singing in it, we were delighted.

Saturday, 10th.– … We had a talk about the fashion of southern countries of serenading, which I am very glad is not an English fashion. Music, as long as I am awake, is a pure and perfect delight to me, but to be wakened out of my sleep by music is to wake in a spasm of nervous terror, shaking from head to foot, and sick at my stomach, with indescribable fear and dismay; certainly no less agreeable effect could possibly be contemplated by the gallantry of a serenading admirer, so I am glad our admirers do not serenade us English girls. This picturesque practice prevails all through the United States, where the dry brilliancy of the climate and skies is favorable to the paying and receiving this melodious homage, and where musical bands, sometimes numbering fifty, are marshaled by personal or political admirers, under the balconies of reigning beauties or would-be-reigning public men. My total ignorance of this prevailing practice in the United States led to a very prosaic demonstration of gratitude on my part toward my first serenaders; for I opened my window and rewarded them with a dollar, which one of the recipients informed me he should always keep, to my no small confusion, not knowing the nature of my gratuitous indulgence, and that, like my Lady Greensleeves in the old English ballad, "My music still to play and sing" would be, while I remained in America, a disinterested demonstration of the devotion of my friends.... My poor mother is in the deepest distress about my father. Inflammation of the lungs is dreaded, and he is spitting blood. I felt as if I were turning to stone as I heard it. I came up to my own room and cried most bitterly for a long time. In the afternoon I was allowed to go in and see my father; but I was so overcome that, as I stooped to kiss his hand, I was almost suffocated with suppressed sobs. I did control myself, however, sufficiently to be able to sit by him for a while with tolerable composure. Cecilia and Mrs. Wilkinson called, and were very kind and affectionate to me. They brought news that Harry Siddons had arrived in India and been sent off to Delhi. My brother Henry, poor child, came and lay on the sofa in my room, and we cried together almost through the whole afternoon, in spite of our efforts to comfort each other. My heart dies away when I think of my dear father.... I got a very kind and affectionate letter from Lady Francis; she wants us very much to go again to Oatlands. After all, perhaps it would not be so sad there as I think, though it must appear changed enough in some respects, if not in all. Everything is winter now, within and without me; and when I was last there it was summer, in my heart and over all the earth. My cedar palace is there still, and to that I should bring more change than I should find. Poor Undine! how often I think of that true story. When I went to the theater my heart really sickened at my work; my eyes smarted, and my voice was broken, with my whole day's crying. The house seemed good; I played ill, and felt very ill. Lord M– was in the stage-box, which annoyed me. I hate to have my society acquaintance close to me while I am acting. The play was "Venice Preserved." After I came home I saw my father, who is a little better; but now Henry is quite unwell, and I am in a high fever—I suppose with all this wretchedness and exertion.

Thursday, 13th.—My father has passed a quieter night, thank God. I went to Fozzard's riding-school with John, and tried a hot little hunter that they want to persuade Lady Chesterfield to ride—a very pretty creature, but quite too eager for the school. While I was riding Lady Grey came in, very much frightened, upon her horse, which was rather fresh. She took Gazelle, which I was riding, and I rode her horse tame for her. It is very odd that, riding as well as she does, she should be so miserably nervous on horseback.... I drove to Mrs. Mayo's, who impressed and affected me very much. Those magnificent eyes of hers are becoming dim; she is growing blind, with eyes like dark suns. I could not help expressing the deep concern I felt for such a calamity. She replied that doubtless it was a trial, but that she saw many others afflicted with dispensations so much heavier than her own, that she was content. To grow blind contentedly is to be very brave and good, and I admired and loved her even more than I did before. When I came home, I went and sat with my father. He has decided that we shall not go to Oatlands, and I am hardly sorry for it.

Friday, 14th.—Went over my part for to-night.... Victoire came with me to the theater instead of Dall, whose whole time is taken up attending on my father. The house was bad, and I thought I acted very ill, though Victoire and John, who was in the front, said I did not. Henry Greville was in the boxes, and to my surprise went from them to the pit, though I ought not to have been surprised, for, for such a fine gentleman, he is a very sensible man. Colonel and Lady C. Cavendish were in the orchestra, and how I did wish them further. I do so wonder, in the middle of my stage despair, what business my drawing-room acquaintances have sitting staring at it. My dress was beautiful. As for the audience, I do not know what ailed them, but they seemed to have agreed together only to applaud at the end of the scenes, so that I got no resting interruptions, and was half dead with fatigue at the end of the play. I read Daru's "Venice" between the scenes, and saw my father for a few minutes after I came home.

Thursday, 15th.—Had a delightful long letter from H–, who is a poet without the jingle.... Another physician is to be called in for my father. Oh, my dear father! Mr. Bartley was with him about this horrible theater business.... My mother went in the evening with John to hear Miss Sheriff in Polly. It is her first night in "The Beggar's Opera," and my father wished to know how it went. I stayed at home with poor Henry, and after tea sat with my father till bedtime.

Friday, 16th.—Went to the theater at eleven, and rehearsed Isabella in the saloon, the stage being occupied with a rehearsal of the pantomime. When my rehearsal was over, the carriage not being come, I went down to see what they were doing. There was poor Farleigh, nose and all (a worthy, amiable man, and excellent comic character, with a huge excrescence of a nose), qui se déménait like one frantic; huge Mr. Stansbury, with a fiddle in his hand, dancing, singing, prompting, and swearing; the whole corps de ballet attitudinizing in muddy shoes and poke-bonnets, and the columbine, in dirty stockings and a mob-cap, ogling the harlequin in a striped shirt and dusty trousers. What a wrong side to the show the audience will see!

My father is better, thank God! After dinner sat with poor Henry till time to go to the theater. Played Isabella. House bad. I played well; I always do to an empty house (this was my invariable experience both in my acting and reading performances, and I came to the conclusion that as my spirits were not affected by a small audience, they, on the contrary, were exhilarated by the effect upon my lungs and voice of a comparatively cool and free atmosphere). I read Daru between my scenes; I find it immensely interesting.... I read Niccolini's "Giovanni di Procida," but did not like it very much; I thought it dull and heavy, and not up to the mark of such a very fine subject.

Saturday, 17th.– … My father, thank God, appears much better.... I have christened the pretty mare I have bought "Donna Sol," in honor of my part in "Hernani." In the evening I read Daru, and wrote a few lines of "The Star of Seville;" but I hate it, and the whole thing is as dead as ditch-water.

Sunday, 18th.—To church.... After I came home I went and sat with my father. Poor fellow! he is really better; I thank God inexpressibly!

Great Russell Street, December 18.

Dear H–,

I have had time to write neither long nor short letters for the last week; Mr. Young's engagement being at an end, I have been called back to my work, and have had to rehearse, and to act, and to be much too busy to write to you until to-day, when I have caught up all my arrears.

My father, thank God, is once more recovering, but we have twice been alarmed at such sudden relapses that we hardly dare venture to hope he is really convalescent. Inflammation on the lungs has, it seems, been going on for a considerable time, and though they think now that it has entirely subsided, yet, as the least exertion or exposure may bring it on again, we are watching him like the apples of our eyes. He has not yet left his bed, to which he has now been confined more than a month....

The exertion I have been obliged to make when leaving him to go and act, was so full of misery and dread lest I should find him worse, perhaps dead, on my return, that no words can describe what I have suffered at that dreadful theater. Thank God, however, he is now certainly better, out of present danger, and I trust and pray will soon be beyond any danger of a relapse. Anything like Dall's incessant and unwearied care and tenderness you cannot imagine. Night and day she has watched and waited on him, and I think she must have sunk under all the fatigue she has undergone but for the untiring goodness and kindness of heart that has supported her under it all. She is invaluable to us all, and every day adds to her claims upon our love and gratitude....

In the passage you quote from Godwin, he seems to think a friend of more use in reproving what is evil in us than I believe is really the case. Do you think our faults and follies can ever be more effectually sifted, analyzed, and condemned by another than by our own conscience? I do not think if one could put one's heart into one's friends' hand that they could detect one defect or evil quality that had not been marked and acknowledged in the depths of one's own consciousness. Do you suppose people shrink more from the censure of others than from self-condemnation? I find it difficult to think so.... You appear to me always to wish to submit your faith to a process which invariably breaks your apparatus and leaves you very much dissatisfied, with your faith still a simple element in you, in spite of your endeavors to analyze or decompose it. Are not, after all, our convictions our only steadfastly grounded faith? I do not mean conviction wrought out in the loom of logical argument, where one's understanding must have shuttled backward and forward through every thread a thousand times before the woof is completed, but the spiritual convictions, the intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent contemplation, but a curious search into whose nature would, at any rate temporarily, blur and dissipate and destroy....