Among the passages in Charles Greville's Memoirs that shocked me most, and that I read with the most pain, were the coarse and cruel terms in which he spoke of Queen Adelaide.
Mademoiselle d'Este, when far advanced in middle life, married Lord Chancellor Truro. She may have found in so doing a certain satisfaction to her pride which no other alliance with a commoner could have afforded her, since the Lord Chancellor of England (no matter of how lowly an origin), on certain occasions, takes precedence of the whole aristocracy of the land.]
Harley Street, Monday, May 30th, 1842.
My dearest Harriet,
I have just finished a letter to you, in which I tell you that I have sketched out the skeleton of another tragedy; but I find Emily has been beforehand with me. You ask me what has moved me to this mental effort. My milliner's bill, my dear; which, being £97 sterling, I feel extremely inclined to pay out of my own brains; for, though they received a very severe shock, and one of rather paralyzing effect, upon my being reminded that whatever I write is not my own legal property, but that of another, which, of course, upon consideration, I know; I cannot, nevertheless, persuade myself that that which I invent—create, in fact—can really belong to any one but myself; therefore, if anything I wrote could earn me £97, I am afraid I should consider that I, and no one else, had paid my bill.
In thinking over the position of women with regard to their right to their own earnings, I confess to something very like wrathful indignation; impotent wrath and vain indignation, to be sure—not the less intense for that, however, for the injustice is undoubtedly great. That a man whose wits could not keep him half a week from starving should claim as his the result of a mental process such as that of composing a noble work of imagination—say "Corinne," for example—seems too beneficent a provision of the law for the protection of male superiority. It is true that, by our marriage bargain, they feed, clothe, and house us, and are answerable for our debts (not my milliner's bill, though, if I can prevent it), and so, I suppose, have a right to pay themselves as best they can out of all we are or all we can do. It is a pretty severe puzzle, and a deal of love must be thrown into one or other or both scales to make the balance hang tolerably even.
Madame de Staël, I suppose, might have said to Rocca, "If my brains are indeed yours, why don't you write a book like 'Corinne' with them?" You know, though he was perfectly amiable, and she married him for love, he was an intellectual zero; but perhaps the man who, acknowledging her brilliant intellectual superiority, could say, "Je l'aimerai tant, qu'elle finira par m'aimer," deserved to be master even of his wife's brains.... I wish women could be dealt with, not mercifully, nor compassionately, nor affectionately, but justly; it would be so much better—for men.
How can you ask me if I despise, as great gossip, Emily's telling you that I am writing another tragedy! Why, my dear, I shouldn't consider it despicable gossip if Emily were to tell you what colored gloves I had on the last time she saw me. Do we not all three love each other dearly? and is not everything, no matter how trifling, of interest in that case? But Mrs. John Kemble does not pretend to love me dearly, I flatter myself, and therefore her writing to inquire into my proceedings, and for minute details of my presentation at Court, did seem to me contemptible gossip. At her age, perhaps, it is pardonable enough, though it appears to me rather inconsistent, when one has no liking for a person, to trouble one's head about where they go or what they do.
A SEQUEL TO "THE STRANGER." You ask me about the subject of my play. It is one that my father suggested to me years ago, and which grew out of a question as to whether the Stranger (in Kotzebue's play so called) does or does not forgive his unfaithful wife in the closing scene. With several other dramatic schemes, it has hovered dimly before my imagination for some time past. The other night, however, as I was brushing my hair before going to bed, my brain, I suppose, receiving some stimulus from the scrubbing of my skull, the whole idea suddenly came towards me with increasing distinctness, till it gradually stood up as it were from head to foot before me—a very mournful figure, whose form and features were all vividly defined. I instantly caught up S——'s copy-books—there was no other paper at hand—and on the covers of two of them wrote out my play, act by act and scene by scene.... The short-lived triumph of this spirit of inspiration died away under the effect of a conversation by which it was interrupted, and I collapsed like a fallen omelette soufflée (not to say souffletée).
The story of my piece is a sequel to "The Stranger," the retribution which reaches the faithless wife and mother in her children, after they grow up; which, together with the perpetual struggle on the part of her husband (who has taken her home again) not to wound her conscience, which is so sick and sore that every word, breath, and look does wound it, might form, I think, an interesting dramatic picture, with considerable elements for poetry to work upon.