Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

I am ever your own

F. A. B.

Clarges Street.

This letter was begun three days ago, and it is now Thursday, March the 25th. Do not, I beseech you, ever make any appeals to my imagination, or my feelings. I have lost all I ever had of the first, and I never had any at all of the second....

You ask me if I have been riding. Only once or twice, for I may not do what I so fain would, give all the visiting to utter neglect, and ride every day. Yesterday I was on horseback for two hours with Henry, who, having sold his pretty mare, for £65, to the author of the new comedy at Covent Garden, was obliged to bestride one of Mr. Allen's screws, as he calls them. The day was dusty and windy, and very disagreeable, but I was all the better for my shaking, as I always am. I am never in health, looks, or spirits without daily hard exercise on horseback.

My first meeting with Mrs. Grote (I am answering your questions, dearest H——, though you have probably forgotten them) took place after all at Sydney Smith's, at a dinner the very next day after you left us. We did not say a great deal to each other, but upon my saying incidentally (I forget about what) "I, who have always preserved my liberty, at least the small crumb of it that a woman can own anywhere," she faced about, in a most emphatical manner, and said, "Then you've struggled for it." "No, I have not been obliged to do so." "Ah, then you must, or you'll lose it, you'll lose it, depend upon it." I smiled, but did not reply, because I saw that she was not taking into consideration the fact of my living in America; and this was the only truly Grotesque (as Sydney Smith says) passage between us. Since then we have again ineffectually exchanged cards, and yesterday I received an invitation to her house, so that I suppose we shall finally become acquainted with each other.

MRS. GROTE. [Mrs. Grote, wife of George Grote, the banker, member of Parliament, and historian of Greece, was one of the cleverest and most eccentric women in the London society of my time. No worse a judge than De Tocqueville pronounced her the cleverest woman of his acquaintance; and she was certainly a very remarkable member of the circle of remarkable men among whom she was living when I first knew her. At that time she was the female centre of the Radical party in politics—a sort of not-young-or-handsome feminine oracle among a set of very clever half-heathenish men, in whose drawing-room, Sydney Smith used to say, he always expected to find an altar to Zeus. At this time Mr. Grote was in the House of Commons, and as it was before the publication of his admirable history, his speeches, which were as remarkable for their sound sense and enlightened liberality as for their clear and forcible style, were not unfrequently attributed to his wife, whose considerable conversational powers, joined to a rather dictatorial style of exercising them, sometimes threw her refined and modest husband a little into the shade in general society. When first I made Mrs. Grote's acquaintance, the persons one most frequently met at her house in Eccleston Street were Roebuck, Leader, Byron's quondam associate Trelawney, and Sir William Molesworth; both the first and last mentioned gentlemen were then of an infinitely deeper shade of radicalism in their politics than they subsequently became. The other principal element of Mrs. Grote's society, at this time, consisted of musical composers and performers, who found in her a cordial and hospitable friend and hostess, and an amateur of unusual knowledge and discrimination, as well as much taste and feeling for their beautiful art. Her love of music, and courteous reception of all foreign artists, caused her to be generally sought by eminent professors coming to England; and Liszt, Madame Viardot, Dessauer, Thalberg, Mademoiselle Lind, and Mendelssohn were among the celebrated musicians one frequently met at her house. With the two latter she was very intimate, and it was in her drawing-room that my sister gave her first public concert in London. Mendelssohn used often to visit her at a small country-place she had in the neighborhood of [Burnham] Beeches.

It was a very small and modest residence, situated on the verge of the magnificent tract of woodland scenery known by that name; a dependence, I believe, of the Dropmore estate, which it adjoined. It was an unenclosed space of considerable extent, of wild, heathy moorland; short turfy strips of common; dingles full of foxglove, harebell, and gnarled old stunted hawthorn bushes; and knolls, covered with waving crests of powerful feathery fern. It was intersected with gravelly paths and roads, whose warm color contrasted and harmonized with the woodland hues of everything about them; and roofed in by dark green vaults of the most magnificent beech foliage I have ever seen anywhere. The trees were of great age and enormous size; and from some accidental influence affecting their growth, the huge trunks were many of them contorted so as to resemble absolutely the twisted Saxon pillars of some old cathedral. In many of them the powerful branches (as large themselves as trunks of common trees) spread out from the main tree, at a height of about six feet from the ground, into a sort of capacious leafy chamber, where eight or ten people could have sat embowered. A more perfectly English woodland scene it would be impossible to imagine, and here, as Mrs. Grote told me, Mendelssohn found the inspiration of much of the music of his "Midsummer Night's Dream." (The overture he had composed, and played to us one evening at my father's house, when first he came to England, before he was one-and-twenty.) At one time Mrs. Grote contemplated erecting some monument in the beautiful wood to his memory, and showed me a copy of verses, not devoid of merit, which she thought of inscribing on it to his honor; but she never carried out the suggestion of her affectionate admiration; and to those who knew and loved Mendelssohn (alas! the expressions are synonymous), the glorious wood itself, where he walked and mused and held converse with the spirit of Shakespeare, forms a solemn sylvan temple, forever consecrated to tender memories of his bright genius and lovely character.

When first I knew Mrs. Grote, however, her artistic sympathies were keenly excited in a very different direction; for she had undertaken, under some singular impulse of mistaken enthusiasm, to make what she called "an honest woman" of the celebrated dancer, Fanny Ellsler, and to introduce her into London society,—neither of them very attainable results, even for as valiant and enterprising a person as Mrs. Grote. When first I heard of this strange undertaking I was, in common with most of her friends, much surprised at it; nor was it until some years after the entire failure of this quixotic experiment, that I became aware that she had been actuated by any motive but the kindliest and most mistaken enthusiasm.

Mademoiselle Ellsler was at this time at the height of her great and deserved popularity as a dancer, and whatever I may have thought of the expediency or possibility of making what Mrs. Grote called "an honest woman" of her, I was among the most enthusiastic admirers of her great excellence in her elegant art. She was the only intellectual dancer I have ever seen. Inferior to Taglioni (that embodied genius of rhythmical motion) in lightness, grace, and sentiment; to Carlotta Grisi in the two latter qualities; and with less mere vigor and elasticity than Cerito, she excelled them all in dramatic expression; and parts of her performance in the ballets of the "Tarantella" and the wild legend of "Gisele, the Willye," exhibited tragic power of a very high order, while the same strongly dramatic element was the cause of her pre-eminence in all national and characteristic dances, such as El Jaleo de Xeres, the Cracovienne, et cetera. This predominance of the intellectual element in her dancing may have been the result of original organization, or it may have been owing to the mental training which Ellsler received from Frederic von Genz, Gensius, the German writer and diplomatist, who educated her, and whose mistress she became while still quite a young girl. However that may be, Mrs. Grote always maintained that her genius lay full as much in her head as in her heels. I am not sure that the finest performance of hers that I ever witnessed was not a minuet in which she danced the man's part, in full court-suit of the time of Louis XVI., with most admirable grace and nobility of demeanor.