Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Mrs. E—— told me that she had heard from some of the great Oxford dons that the impression produced among them by the first pupil of Arnold's who came among them was quite extraordinary—not at all from superior intelligence or acquirement, but from his being absolutely a new creature (think of the Scripture use of that term, Hal, and think how this circumstance illustrates it)—a new kind of man; and that so they found all his pupils to differ from any young men that had come up to their colleges before. When I deplored the cessation of this noble and powerful influence by Arnold's death, she said—what indeed I knew—that his spirit survived him and would work mightily still. And so of course it will continue to work, for to the increase of the seed sown by such a one there is no limit. She told me that one of his pupils—by no means an uncommon but rather dull and commonplace young man—had said in speaking of him, "I was dreadfully afraid of Arnold, but there was not the thing he could have told me to do that I should not instantly and confidently have set about." What a man! I do wonder if I shall see him in heaven—as it is called—if ever I get there.

Mrs. E—— told me that Lady Francis [Egerton] knew him, and did not like him altogether; but then he, it seems, was habitually reserved, and she neither soft nor warm certainly in her outward demeanor, so perhaps they really never met at all.... Mrs. E—— said Lady Francis had not considered her correspondence with Arnold satisfactory. I suspect it was upon theological questions of doctrine (or doctrinal questions of theology); and that Lady Francis had complained that his letters did not come sufficiently to the point. What can her point have been?...

DEATHBED UTTERANCES. As for what you say about deathbed utterances—it seems to me the height of folly to attach the importance to them that is often given to them. The physical conditions are at that time such as often amply to account for what are received as spiritual ecstasies or agonies. I imagine whatever the laity may do, few physicians are inclined to consider their patients' utterances in articulo mortis as satisfactorily significant of anything but their bodily state. Certainly by what you tell me of —— his moral perceptions do not appear to have received any accession of light whatever from the near dawning of that second life which seems sometimes to throw such awful brightness as the dying are about to enter it far over the past that they are leaving behind.

My dinner at Mrs. Procter's was very pleasant. In the first place I love her husband very much; then there were Kenyon, Chorley, Henry Reeve, Monckton Milnes, and Browning!—a goodly company, you'll allow. Oh, how I wish wits were catching! but if they were, I don't suppose after that dinner I should be able to put up with poor pitiful prose people like you for a long time to come.

With regard to the London standard of morality, dear Hal, I do not think it lower, but probably a little higher upon the whole than that of the society of other great capitals: the reasons why this highly civilized atmosphere must be also so highly mephitic are obvious enough, and therefore as no alteration is probable, or perhaps possible in that respect, I am not altogether sorry to think that I shall live in a denser intellectual but clearer moral atmosphere in my "other world." I do not believe that the brains shrink much when the soul is well nourished, or that the intellect starves and dwindles upon what feeds and expands the spirit.

My little sketch of Lenox Lake lies always open before me, and I look at it very often with yearning eyes ... for the splendid rosy sunsets over the dark blue mountain-tops, and for the clear and lovely expanse of pure waters reflecting both, above all for the wild white-footed streams that come leaping down the steep stairways of the hills. I believe I do like places better than people: these only look like angels sometimes, but the earth in such spots looks like heaven always—especially the mountain-tops so near the sky, so near the stars, so near the sun, with the clouds below them, and the humanity of the world and its mud far below them again—all but the spirit of adoration which one has carried up thither one's self. I do not wonder the heathen of whom the Hebrew Scriptures complain offered sacrifices on every high hill: they seem—they are—altars built by God for His especial worship. Good-bye, my dearest Hal.

Yours ever,

Fanny.

[After I had the pleasure and honor of making Baron Bunsen's acquaintance, I was one day talking with him about Arnold, and the immense loss I considered his death to England, when he answered, almost in Mrs. E——'s words, but still more emphatically, that he would work better even dead than alive, that there was in him a powerful element of antagonism which roused antagonism in others: his individuality, he said, stood sometimes in the way of his purpose, he darkened his own light; "he will be more powerful now that he is gone than even while he was here."

In Charles Greville's "Memoirs," he speaks of going down to Oatlands to consult his sister and her husband (Lord and Lady Francis Egerton) upon the expediency of Arnold's being made a bishop by the prime minister of the day—I think his friend, Lord Melbourne—and says that they gave their decided opinion against it. I wonder if the correspondence which Lady Francis characterized as "unsatisfactory" was her ground of objection against Arnold. It is a curious thing to me to imagine his calling to the highest ecclesiastical office to have depended in any measure upon her opinion.