Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Fanny.

Liège, Thursday, August 26th, 1841.

My dearest Harriet,

AT LIÈGE. We have just returned from a lionizing drive about Liège, a city of which my liveliest impressions, before I saw it, were derived from Scott's novel of "Quentin Durward," and in which the part now remaining of what existed in his time is all that much interests me.

I do not know whether in your peregrinations you ever visited this place; if you did, I hope you duly admired the palace of the prince bishop (formerly), now the Palais de Justice, which is one of the most picturesque remnants of ancient architecture I have seen in this land of them.

Except this, and one fine old church, I have found nothing in the town to please or interest me much. I have seen one or two old dog-holes of houses, blackened and falling in with age, which seem as if they might be some of the cinders of Charles the Bold's burnings hereabouts. We left Brussels this morning, after spending a day and a half there. I was much pleased with the gay and cheerful appearance of that small imitation Paris, even to the degree of fancying that I should like to live there, in spite of the supercilious sentence of vulgarity, stupidity, and pretension which some of our friends, diplomatic residents there, passed upon the inhabitants.... We went to call upon the ——s, and, with something of a shock on my part, found one of the ornaments of his sitting-room a large crucifix with the Saviour in his death-agony—a horrible image, which I would banish, if I could, from every artist's imagination; for the physical suffering is a revolting spectacle which art should not portray, and the spiritual triumph is a thing which the kindred soul of man may indeed conceive, but which art cannot delineate, for it is God, and not to be translated into matter, save indeed where it once was made manifest in that Face and Person every imaginary representation of which is to me more or less intolerable.

The face of Christ is never painted or sculptured without being painfully offensive to me; yet I have seen looks—who has not?—that were His, momentarily, on mortal faces; but they were looks that could not have been copied, even there....

These steamship and railroad times will do away with that staple idea, both in real and literary romances, of "never meeting again," "parting forever," etc., etc.; and people will now meet over and over again, no matter by what circumstances parted, or to what distance thrown from each other; whence I draw the moral that our conduct in all the quarters of the globe had better be as decent as possible, for there is no such thing nowadays as losing sight of people or places—I mean, for any convenient length of time, for purposes of forgetfulness. I forget whether, when you left us in London, my father had come to the determination of not accompanying but following us, which he intends doing as soon as he feels well enough to travel.

Rubens's paintings have given us extreme delight.... I was much interested by the lace-works at Brussels and Mechlin, and very painfully so. It is beginning to be time, I think, in Christian countries, for manufactures of mere luxury to be done away with, when proficiency in the merest mechanical drudgery involved in them demands a lifetime, and the sight and health of women, who begin this twilight work at five and six years old, are often sacrificed long before their natural term to this costly and unhealthy industry.

I hope to see all such manufactures done away with, for they are bad things, and a whole moral and intelligent being, turned into ten fingers' ends for such purposes, is a sad spectacle. I (a lace-worshipper, if ever woman was) say this advisedly; I am sorry there is still Mechlin and Brussels lace made, and glad there is no more India muslin, and rejoice in the disuse of every minute manual labor which tends to make a mere machine of God's likeness. But oh, for all that, how incomparably inferior is the finest, faultless, machine-made lace and muslin to the exquisite irregularity of the human fabric!... Good-bye, my dearest Harriet. We start for Aix-la-Chapelle at eight to-morrow. I am not in very good strength; the fact is, I am now never in thoroughly good plight without exercise on horseback, and it is a long time since I have had any, and, of course, it is now quite out of the question. I beg, desire, entreat, and command that you will immediately get and read Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," and tell me instantly what you think of it.