Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

WHIRL OF EXCITEMENT. From the midst of this musical Maelstrom I send you a voice, which, if heard instead of read, would be lamentable enough. We are lifted off our feet by the perfect torrent of engagements, of visits, of going out and receiving; our house is full, from morning till night, of people coming to sing with or listen to my sister. How her strength is to resist the demands made upon it by the violent emotions she is perpetually expressing, or how any human throat is to continue pouring out such volumes of sound without rest or respite, passes my comprehension. Now, let me tell you how I am surrounded at this minute while I write to you. At my very table sit Trelawney and Charles Young, talking to me and to each other; farther on, towards my father, Mr. G—— C——; and an Italian singer on one side of my sister; and on the other, an Italian painter, who has brought letters of introduction to us; then Mary Anne Thackeray; ... furthermore, the door has just closed upon an English youth of the name of B——, who sings almost as well as an Italian, and with whom my sister has been singing her soul out for the last two hours.... We dined yesterday with the Francis Egertons; to-morrow evening we have a gathering here, with, I beg you to believe, nothing under the rank of a viscount, Beauforts, Normanbys, Wiltons, illustrissimi tutti quanti. Friday, my sister sings at the Palace, and we are all enveloped in a golden cloud of fashionable hard work, which rather delights my father; which my sister lends herself to, complaining a little of the trouble, fatigue, and late hours; but thinking it for the interest of her future public career, and always becoming rapt and excited beyond all other considerations in her own capital musical performances.... As for me, I am rather bewildered by the whirl in which we live, which I find rather a trying contrast to my late solitary existence in America.... The incessant music wears upon my nerves a great deal; but chiefly, I think, because half the time I am not able to listen to it quietly, and it distracts me while I am obliged to attend to other things. But indeed, often, when I can give my undivided attention to it, my sister's singing excites me to such a degree that I am obliged, after crying my bosom full of tears, to run out of the room.

My father continues in wonderful good looks and spirits.... Here, dear H——, a long interruption.... We are off to St. John's Wood, to dine with the Procters: —— is not ready; my sister is lying on the sofa, reading aloud an Italian letter to me; the children are rioting about the room like a couple of little maniacs, and I feel inclined to endorse Macbeth's opinion of life, that it is all sound and fury and signifying nothing.... Thus far, and another interruption; and now it is to-morrow, and Lady Grey and Lady G—— have just gone out of the room, and Chauncy Hare Townsend has just come in, followed by his mesmeric German patient, who is going to perform his magnetic magic for us. I think I will let him try what sort of a subject I should be.

I enclose a little note and silk chain, brought for you from America by Miss Fanny Appleton [afterwards Mrs. Longfellow], who has just arrived in London, to the great joy of her sister. I suppose these tokens come to you from the Sedgwicks. I have a little box which poor C—— S—— brought from Catherine for you—a delicate carved wooden casket, that I have not sent to you because I was afraid it would be broken, by any post or coach conveyance. Tell me about this, how I shall send it to you. I have obtained too for you that German book which I delight in so very much, Richter's "Fruit, Flower, and Thorn Pieces," and which, in the midst of much that is probably too German, in thought, feeling, and expression, to meet with your entire sympathy, will, I think, furnish you with sweet and pleasant thoughts for a while; I scarce know anything that I like much better.

I was going to see Rachel this evening, but my brother and his wife having come up to town for the day, I do not think we ought all to go out and leave them; so that —— is gone with Adelaide and Lady M——, and I shall seize this quiet chance for writing to Emily, to whom I have not yet contrived to send a word since she left town. God bless you.

Ever yours,

Fanny.

A CLAIRVOYANT. [The young lad Alexis, to whom I have referred in this letter was, I think, one of the first of the long train of mesmerists, magnetizers, spiritualists, charlatans, cheats, and humbugs who subsequently appealed to the notice and practised on the credulity of London society. Mr. Chauncy Hare Townsend was an enthusiastic convert to the theory of animal magnetism, and took about with him, to various houses, this German boy, whose exhibition of mesmeric phenomena was the first I ever witnessed. Mr. Townsend had almost insisted upon our receiving this visit, and we accordingly assembled in the drawing-room, to witness the powers of Alexis. We were all of us sceptical, one of our party so incurably so that after each exhibition of clairvoyance given by Alexis, and each exclamation of Mr. Townsend's, "There now, you see that?" he merely replied, with the most imperturbable phlegm, "Yes, I see it, but I don't believe it." The clairvoyant power of the young man consisted principally in reading passages from books presented to him while under the influence of the mesmeric sleep, into which he had been thrown by Mr. Townsend, and with which he was previously unacquainted. The results were certainly sufficiently curious, though probably neither marvellous nor unaccountable. To make sure that his eyes were really effectually closed, cotton-wool was laid over them, and a broad, tight bandage placed upon them; during another trial the hands of our chief sceptic were placed upon his eyelids, so as effectually to keep them completely closed, in spite of which he undoubtedly read out of a book held up before him above his eyes, and rather on a level with his forehead; nor can I remember any instance in which he appeared to find any great difficulty in doing so, except when a book suddenly fetched from another room was opened before him, when he hesitated and expressed incapacity, and then said, "The book is French;" which it was.

Believing entirely in a sort of hitherto undefined, and possibly undefinable, physical influence, by which the nervous system of one person may be affected by that of another, by special exercise of will and effort, so as to produce an almost absolute temporary subserviency of the whole nature to the force by which it is acted upon, and therefore thinking it extremely possible, and not improbable, that many of the instances of mesmeric influence I have heard related had some foundation in truth, I have, nevertheless, kept entirely aloof from the whole subject, never voluntarily attended any exhibitions of such phenomena, and regarded the whole series of experiments and experiences and pretended marvels of the numerous adepts in mesmerism with contempt and disgust—contempt for the crass ignorance and glaring dishonesty involved in their practices; and disgust, because of the moral and physical mischief their absurd juggleries were likely to produce, and in many instances did produce, upon subjects as ignorant, but less dishonest, than the charlatans by whom they were duped.

The thing having, in my opinion, a very probable existence, possibly a physical force of considerable effect, and not thoroughly ascertained or understood nature, the experiments people practised and lent themselves to appeared to me exactly as wise and as becoming as if they had drunk so much brandy or eaten so much opium or hasheesh, by way of trying the effect of these drugs upon their constitution; with this important difference that the magnetic experiments severely tested the nervous system of both patient and operator, and had, besides, an indefinite element of moral importance, in the attempted control of one human will by another, through physical means, which appeared to me to place all such experiments at once among things forbidden to rational and responsible agents.

I am now speaking only of the early developments of physical phenomena exhibited by the first magnetizers and mesmerizers—the conjurers by passes and somnolence and other purely physical processes; the crazy and idiotic performances of their successors, the so-called spiritualists, with their grotesque and disgusting pretence of intercourse with the spirits of the dead through the legs of their tables and chairs, seemed to me the most melancholy testimony to an utter want of faith in things spiritual, of belief in God and Christ's teaching, and a pitiful craving for such a faith, as well as to the absence of all rational common sense, in the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries in our Christian communities), that which was farcical in the lowest degree became tragical in the highest. I only witnessed this one mesmeric exhibition, on the occasion of this visit paid to us by Mr. Townsend and Alexis, until several years afterwards, in the house of my excellent friend Mr. Combe, in Edinburgh, when I was one of a party called upon to witness some experiments of the same kind. I was staying with Mr. Combe and my cousin Cecilia, when one evening their friend Mrs. Crow, authoress of more than one book, I believe, and of a collection of supernatural horrors, of stories of ghosts, apparitions, etc., etc., called "The Night Side of Nature" (the lady had an evident sympathy for the absurd and awful), came, bringing with her a Dr. Lewis, a negro gentleman, who was creating great excitement in Edinburgh by his advocacy of the theories of mesmerism, and his own powers of magnetizing. Mrs. Crow had threatened Mr. and Mrs. Combe with a visit from this professor, and though neither of them had the slightest tendency to belief in any such powers as those Dr. Lewis laid claim to, they received him with kindly courtesy, and consented, with the amused indifference of scepticism, to be spectators of his experiments. Under these circumstances, great as was my antipathy to the whole thing, I did not like to raise any objection to it or to leave the room, which would have been a still more marked expression of my feeling; so I sat down with the rest of the company round the drawing-room table, Mr. and Mrs. Combe, Dr. Lewis, Mrs. Crow, our friend Professor William Gregory, and Dr. Becker—the latter gentleman a man of science, brother, I think, to Prince Albert's private librarian—who was to be the subject of Dr. Lewis's experiments, having already lent himself for the same purpose to that gentleman, and been pronounced highly sensitive to the magnetic influence.