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,