And I remain yours ever sincerely,
A very small Peat-contributor,
E. F.G.
I am glad to say that Clark and Wright Bowdlerize
Shakespeare, though much less extensively than Bowdler. But in one case, I think, they have gone further—altering, instead of omitting: which is quite wrong!
XXVIII.
Lowestoft: April 19/75.
Dear Mrs. Kemble,
Yesterday I wrote you a letter: enveloped it: then thought there was something in it you might misunderstand—Yes!—the written word across the Atlantic looking perhaps so different from what intended; so kept my Letter in my pocket, and went my ways. This morning your Letter of April 3 is forwarded to me; and I shall re-write the one thing that I yesterday wrote about—as I had intended to do before your Letter came. Only, let me say that I am really ashamed that you should have taken the trouble to write again about my little, little, Book.
Well—what I wrote about yesterday, and am to-day about to re-write, is—Macready’s Memoirs. You asked me in your previous Letter whether I had read them. No—I had not: and had meant to wait till they came down to Half-price on the Railway Stall before I bought them. But I wanted to order something of my civil Woodbridge Bookseller: so took the course of ordering this Book, which I am now reading at Leisure: for it does not interest me enough
to devour at once. It is however a very unaffected record of a very conscientious Man, and Artist; conscious (I think) that he was not a great Genius in his Profession, and conscious of his defect of Self-control in his Morals. The Book is almost entirely about himself, his Studies, his Troubles, his Consolations, etc.; not from Egotism, I do think, but as the one thing he had to consider in writing a Memoir and Diary. Of course one expects, and wishes, that the Man’s self should be the main subject; but one also wants something of the remarkable people he lived with, and of whom one finds little here but that ‘So-and-so came and went’—scarce anything of what they said or did, except on mere business; Macready seeming to have no Humour; no intuition into Character, no Observation of those about him (how could he be a great Actor then?)—Almost the only exception I have yet reached is his Account of Mrs. Siddons, whom he worshipped: whom he acted with in her later years at Country Theatres: and who was as kind to him as she was even then heart-rending on the Stage. He was her Mr. Beverley: [71] ‘a very young husband,’ she told him: but ‘in the right way if he would study, study, study—and not marry till thirty.’ At another time, when he was on the stage, she stood at the side scene, called out ‘Bravo, Sir, Bravo!’ and clapped her hands—all in sight of the Audience, who joined in her Applause. Macready also tells of her falling into such a Convulsion, as it
were, in Aspasia [72a] (what a subject for such a sacrifice!) that the Curtain had to be dropped, and Macready’s Father, and Holman, who were among the Audience, looked at each other to see which was whitest! This was the Woman whom people somehow came to look on as only majestic and terrible—I suppose, after Miss O’Neill rose upon her Setting.