LIII.
Dunwich: August 24, [1878.]
Dear Mrs. Kemble,
I forget if I wrote to you from this solitary Seaside, last year: telling you of its old Priory walls, etc. I think you must have been in Switzerland when I
was here; however, I’ll not tell you the little there is to tell about it now; for, beside that I may have told it all before, this little lodging furnishes only a steel pen, and very diluted ink (as you see), and so, for your own sake, I will be brief. Indeed, my chief object in writing at all, is, to ask when you go abroad, and how you have done at Malvern since last I heard from you—now a month ago, I think.
About the beginning of next week I shall be leaving this place—for good, I suppose—for the two friends—Man and Wife—who form my Company here, living a long musket shot off, go away—he in broken health—and would leave the place too solitary without them. So I suppose I shall decamp along with them; and, after some time spent at Lowestoft, find my way back to Woodbridge—in time to see the End of the Flowers, and to prepare what is to be done in that way for another Year.
And to Woodbridge your Answer may be directed, if this poor Letter of mine reaches you, and you should care to answer it—as you will—oh yes, you will—were it much less significant.
I have been rather at a loss for Books while here, Mudie having sent me a lot I did not care for—not even for Lady Chatterton. Aldis Wright gave me his Edition of Coriolanus to read; and I did not think ‘pow wow’ of it, as Volumnia says. All the people were talking about me.
And I am ever yours truly
E. F.G.
LIV.
Woodbridge: April 3/79.
My dear Mrs. Kemble:—
I know well how exact you are in answering Letters; and I was afraid that you must be in some trouble, for yourself, or others, when I got no reply to a second Letter I wrote you addressed to Baltimore Hotel, Leamington—oh, two months ago. When you last wrote to me, you were there, with a Cough, which you were just going to take with you to Guy’s Cliff. That I thought not very prudent, in the weather we then had. Then I was told by some one, in a letter (not from any Donne, I think—no, Annie Ritchie, I believe) that Mrs. Sartoris was very ill; and so between two probable troubles, I would not trouble you as yet again. I had to go to London for a day three weeks ago (to see a poor fellow dying, sooner or later, of Brain disease), and I ferreted out Mowbray Donne from Somerset House and he told me you were in London, still ill of a Cough; but not your Address. So I wrote to his Wife a few days ago to learn it; and I shall address this Letter accordingly. Mrs. Mowbray writes that you are better, but obliged to take care of yourself. I can only say ‘do not trouble yourself to write’—but I suppose you will—perhaps the more if it be a trouble. See what an Opinion I have of you!—If you write,
pray tell me of Mrs. Sartoris—and do not forget yourself.
It has been such a mortal Winter among those I know, or know of, as I never remember. I have not suffered myself, further than, I think, feeling a few stronger hints of a constitutional sort, which are, I suppose, to assert themselves ever more till they do for me. And that, I suppose, cannot be long adoing. I entered on my 71st year last Monday, March 31.
My elder—and now only—Brother, John, has been shut up with Doctor and Nurse these two months—Æt. 76; his Wife Æt. 80 all but dead awhile ago, now sufficiently recovered to keep her room in tolerable ease: I do not know if my Brother will ever leave his house.
Oh dear! Here is enough of Mortality.
I see your capital Book is in its third Edition, as well it deserves to be. I see no one with whom to talk about it, except one brave Woman who comes over here at rare intervals—she had read my Atlantic Copy, but must get Bentley’s directly it appeared, and she (a woman of remarkably strong and independent Judgment) loves it all—not (as some you know) wishing some of it away. No; she says she wants all to complete her notion of the writer. Nor have I heard of any one who thinks otherwise: so ‘some people’ may be wrong. I know you do not care about all this.
I am getting my ‘Tales of the Hall’ printed, and shall one day ask you, and three or four beside,
whether it had better be published. I think you, and those three or four others, will like it; but they may also judge that indifferent readers might not. And that you will all of you have to tell me when the thing is done. I shall not be in the least disappointed if you tell me to keep it among ‘ourselves,’ so long as ‘ourselves’ are pleased; for I know well that Publication would not carry it much further abroad; and I am very well content to pay my money for the little work which I have long meditated doing. I shall have done ‘my little owl.’ Do you know what that means?—No. Well then; my Grandfather had several Parrots of different sorts and Talents: one of them (‘Billy,’ I think) could only huff up his feathers in what my Grandfather called an owl fashion; so when Company were praising the more gifted Parrots, he would say—‘You will hurt poor Billy’s feelings—Come! Do your little owl, my dear!’—You are to imagine a handsome, hair-powdered, Gentleman doing this—and his Daughter—my Mother—telling of it.
And so it is I do my little owl.
This little folly takes a long bit of my Letter paper—and I do not know that you will see any fun in it. Like my Book, it would not tell in Public.
Spedding reads my proofs—for, though I have confidence in my Selection of the Verse (owl), I have but little in my interpolated Prose, which I make obscure in trying to make short. Spedding
occasionally marks a blunder; but (confound him!) generally leaves me to correct it.
Come—here is more than enough of my little owl. At night we read Sir Walter for an Hour (Montrose just now) by way of ‘Play’—then ‘ten minutes’ refreshment allowed’—and the Curtain rises on Dickens (Copperfield now) which sends me gaily to bed—after one Pipe of solitary Meditation—in which the—‘little owl,’ etc.
By the way, in talking of Plays—after sitting with my poor friend and his brave little Wife till it was time for him to turn bedward—I looked in at the famous Lyceum Hamlet; and soon had looked, and heard enough. It was incomparably the worst I had ever witnessed, from Covent Garden down to a Country Barn. I should scarce say this to you if I thought you had seen it; for you told me you thought Irving might have been even a great Actor, from what you saw of his Louis XI. I think. When he got to ‘Something too much of this,’ I called out from the Pit door where I stood, ‘A good deal too much,’ and not long after returned to my solitary inn. Here is a very long—and, I believe (as owls go) a rather pleasant Letter. You know you are not bound to repay it in length, even if you answer it at all; which I again vainly ask you not to do if a bore.
I hear from Mrs. Mowbray that our dear Donne is but ‘pretty well’; and I am still yours
E. F.G.
LV.
Woodbridge: April 25, [1879.]
Dear Mrs. Kemble,
I think I have let sufficient time elapse before asking you for another Letter. I want to know how you are: and, if you can tell me that you are as well as you and I now expect to be—anyhow, well rid of that Whooping Cough—that will be news enough for one Letter. What else, you shall add of your own free will:—not feeling bound.
When you last wrote me from Leamington, you crossed over your Address: and I (thinking perhaps of America) deciphered it ‘Baltimore.’ I wonder the P. O. did not return me my Letter: but there was no Treason in it, I dare say.
My Brother keeps waiting—and hoping—for—Death: which will not come: perhaps Providence would have let it come sooner, were he not rich enough to keep a Doctor in the house, to keep him in Misery. I don’t know if I told you in my last that he was ill; seized on by a Disease not uncommon to old Men—an ‘internal Disorder’ it is polite to say; but I shall say to you, disease of the Bladder. I had always supposed he would be found dead one good morning, as my Mother was—as I hoped to be—quietly dead of the Heart which he had felt for several Years. But no; it is seen good that he shall be laid on the Rack—which he may
feel the more keenly as he never suffered Pain before, and is not of a strong Nerve. I will say no more of this. The funeral Bell, which has been at work, as I never remember before, all this winter, is even now, as I write, tolling from St. Mary’s Steeple.
‘Parlons d’autres choses,’ as my dear Sévigné says.
I—We—have finished all Sir Walter’s Scotch Novels; and I thought I would try an English one: Kenilworth—a wonderful Drama, which Theatre, Opera, and Ballet (as I once saw it represented) may well reproduce. The Scene at Greenwich, where Elizabeth ‘interviews’ Sussex and Leicester, seemed to me as fine as what is called (I am told, wrongly) Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. [145] Of course, plenty of melodrama in most other parts:—but the Plot wonderful.
Then—after Sir Walter—Dickens’ Copperfield, which came to an end last night because I would not let my Reader read the last Chapter. What a touch when Peggotty—the man—at last finds the lost Girl, and—throws a handkerchief over her face when he takes her to his arms—never to leave her! I maintain it—a little Shakespeare—a Cockney Shakespeare, if you will: but as distinct, if not so great, a piece of pure Genius as was born in Stratford. Oh, I am quite sure of that, had I to choose but one of them, I would choose Dickens’ hundred delightful Caricatures rather than Thackeray’s half-dozen terrible Photographs.
In Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences [146] (quite worth reading about Sheridan) I found that, on January 22, 1802, was produced at Drury Lane an Afterpiece called Urania, by the Honourable W. Spencer, in which ‘the scene of Urania’s descent was entirely new to the stage, and produced an extraordinary effect.’ Hence then the Picture which my poor Brother sent you to America.
‘D’autres choses encore.’ You may judge, I suppose, by the N.E. wind in London what it has been hereabout. Scarce a tinge of Green on the hedgerows; scarce a Bird singing (only once the Nightingale, with broken Voice), and no flowers in the Garden but the brave old Daffydowndilly, and Hyacinth—which I scarce knew was so hardy. I am quite pleased to find how comfortably they do in my Garden, and look so Chinese gay. Two of my dear Blackbirds have I found dead—of Cold and Hunger, I suppose; but one is even now singing—across that Funeral Bell. This is so, as I write, and tell you—Well: we have Sunshine at last—for a day—‘thankful for small Blessings,’ etc.
I think I have felt a little sadder since March 31 that shut my seventieth Year behind me, while my Brother was—in some such way as I shall be if I live two or three years longer—‘Parlons d’autres’—that I am still able to be sincerely yours
E. F.G.
LVI.
Woodbridge: May 18, [1879.]
My dear Mrs. Kemble,
By this Post you ought to receive my Crabbe Book, about which I want your Opinion—not as to your own liking, which I doubt not will be more than it deserves: but about whether it is best confined to Friends, who will like it, as you do, more or less out of private prejudice—Two points in particular I want you to tell me;
(1) Whether the Stories generally seem to you to be curtailed so much that they do not leave any such impression as in the Original. That is too long and tiresome; but (as in Richardson) its very length serves to impress it on the mind:—My Abstract is, I doubt not, more readable: but, on that account partly, leaving but a wrack behind. What I have done indeed is little else than one of the old Review Articles, which gave a sketch of the work, and let the author fill in with his better work.
Well then I want to know—(2) if you find the present tense of my Prose Narrative discordant with the past tense of the text. I adopted it partly by way of further discriminating the two: but I may have misjudged: Tell me: as well as any other points that strike you. You can tell me if you
will—and I wish you would—whether I had better keep the little Opus to ourselves or let it take its chance of getting a few readers in public. You may tell me this very plainly, I am sure; and I shall be quite as well pleased to keep it unpublished. It is only a very, very, little Job, you see: requiring only a little Taste, and Tact: and if they have failed me—Voilà! I had some pleasure in doing my little work very dexterously, I thought; and I did wish to draw a few readers to one of my favourite Books which nobody reads. And, now that I look over it, I fancy that I may have missed my aim—only that my Friends will like, etc. Then, I should have to put some Preface to the Public: and explain how many omissions, and some transpositions, have occasioned the change here and there of some initial particle where two originally separated paragraphs are united; some use made of Crabbe’s original MS. (quoted in the Son’s Edition;) and all such confession to no good, either for my Author or me. I wish you could have just picked up the Book at a Railway Stall, knowing nothing of your old Friend’s hand in it. But that cannot be; tell me then, divesting yourself of all personal Regard: and you may depend upon it you will—save me some further bother, if you bid me let publishing alone. I don’t even know of a Publisher: and won’t have a favour done me by ‘ere a one of them,’ as Paddies say. This is a terrible Much Ado about next to Nothing. ‘Parlons,’ etc.
Blanche Donne wrote me you had been calling in Weymouth Street: that you had been into Hampshire, and found Mrs. Sartoris better—Dear Donne seems to have been pleased and mended by his Children coming about him. I say but little of my Brother’s Death. [149] We were very good friends, of very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his lawn gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and I did not enter them at his Funeral—which you will very likely—and properly—think wrong. He had suffered considerably for some weeks: but, as he became weaker, and (I suppose) some narcotic Medicine—O blessed Narcotic!—soothed his pains, he became dozily happy. The Day before he died, he opened his Bed-Clothes, as if it might be his Carriage Door, and said to his Servant ‘Come—Come inside—I am going to meet them.’
Voilà une petite Histoire. Et voilà bien assez de mes Egoïsmes. Adieu, Madame; dites-moi tout franchement votre opinion sur ce petit Livre; ah! vous n’en pouvez parler autrement qu’avec toute franchise—et croyez moi, tout aussi franchement aussi,
Votre ami dévoué
E. F.G.
LVII.
Woodbridge: May 22, [1879.]
My dear Mrs. Kemble,
I must thank you for your letter; I was, beforehand, much of your Opinion; and, unless I hear very different advice from the two others whom I have consulted—Spedding, the All-wise—(I mean that), and Aldis Wright, experienced in the Booksellers’ world, I shall very gladly abide by your counsel—and my own. You (I do believe) and a few friends who already know Crabbe, will not be the worse for this ‘Handybook’ of one of his most diffuse, but (to me) most agreeable, Books. That name (Handybook), indeed, I had rather thought of calling the Book, rather than ‘Readings’—which suggests readings aloud, whether private or public—neither of which I intended—simply, Readings to oneself. I, who am a poor reader in any way, have found it all but impossible to read Crabbe to anybody. So much for that—except that, the Portrait I had prepared by way of frontispiece turns out to be an utter failure, and that is another satisfactory reason for not publishing. For I particularly wanted this Portrait, copied from a Picture by Pickersgill which was painted in 1817, when these Tales were a-writing, to correct the Phillips Portrait done in the same year, and showing Crabbe with his company Look—not
insincere at all—but not at all representing the writer. When Tennyson saw Laurence’s Copy of this Pickersgill—here, at my house here—he said—‘There I recognise the Man.’
If you were not the truly sincere woman you are, I should have thought that you threw in those good words about my other little Works by way of salve for your dictum on this Crabbe. But I know it is not so. I cannot think what ‘rebuke’ I gave you to ‘smart under’ as you say. [151a]
If you have never read Charles Tennyson (Turner’s) Sonnets, I should like to send them to you to read. They are not to be got now: and I have entreated Spedding to republish them with Macmillan, with such a preface of his own—congenial Critic and Poet—as would discover these Violets now modestly hidden under the rank Vegetation of Browning, Swinburne, and Co. Some of these Sonnets have a Shakespeare fancy in them:—some rather puerile—but the greater part of them, pure, delicate, beautiful, and quite original. [151b] I told Mr. Norton (America) to get them published over the water if no one will do so here.
Little did I think that I should ever come to relish—old Sam Rogers! But on taking him up the other day (with Stothard’s Designs, to be sure!) I found
a sort of Repose from the hatchet-work School, of which I read in the Athenæum.
I like, you know, a good Murder; but in its place—
‘The charge is prepared; the Lawyers are met—
The Judges all ranged, a terrible Show’ [152]—
only the other night I could not help reverting to that sublime—yes!—of Thurtell, sending for his accomplice Hunt, who had saved himself by denouncing Thurtell—sending for him to pass the night before Execution with perfect Forgiveness—Handshaking—and ‘God bless you—God bless you—you couldn’t help it—I hope you’ll live to be a good man.’
You accept—and answer—my Letters very kindly: but this—pray do think—is an answer—verily by return of Post—to yours.
Here is Summer! The leaves suddenly shaken out like flags. I am preparing for Nieces, and perhaps for my Sister Andalusia—who used to visit my Brother yearly.
Your sincere Ancient
E. F.G.