Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Fanny.

Leeds, Friday, November 19th.

Mendelssohn's death did indeed give me a bitter and terrible shock. He was one of the bright sources of truth, at which I had hoped I might drink at some time or other. I always looked forward to some probable season of intercourse with him, the likelihood of which was increased by E—— and Adelaide's love for and intimacy with him. Intercourse with him seemed to me a privilege almost certainly to be mine, in the course of the next few years. This is only my own small selfish share of the great general grief. I feel particularly for E——. He seems to find so very few people that satisfy him, whom he is fond of, or who are at all congenial to him, that the loss of a dear friend, and such a man, will indeed fall heavily upon him.

Those whose sympathies are more general, and whose taste can accept and find pleasure in the intercourse of the majority of their fellow-creatures, are fortunate in this respect, that no one loss can make the world empty for them; and thus the qualities of kindliness and benevolence are repaid, like all other virtues, even in this world (which is nevertheless not heaven), into the bosom of those who practise them.

For a person who has permitted intellectual refinement to become almost a narrow fastidiousness, and whose sympathies are of that exclusive kind that none but special and rarely gifted persons can excite them, the loss of such a friend as Mendelssohn must be incalculable; and I am grieved to the heart for E——.

COVENT GARDEN. I do not know what is to be done with Covent Garden. I suppose it will remain an opera-house; for to fit it for that it has been made well-nigh unavailable for any other purpose, as I think we shall find on the 7th December, when a representation of "Scenes" from various of Shakespeare's plays is to take place there, for the purpose of raising funds for the purchase of the house Shakespeare was born in.

You know what my love and veneration for Shakespeare are; you know, too, how comparatively indifferent to me are those parts of the natures even of those I most love and honor which belong only to their mortality. The dead bodies of my friends appeal, perhaps, even less than they should do to my feelings, since they have been temporarily inhabited and informed by their souls; but acquainted as you are with these notions of mine, you will understand that I do not entirely sympathize with all that is being said and done about the four walls between which the king of poets came into his world. The thing is more distasteful to me, because originally got up by an American charlatan of the first water, with a view to thrust himself into notoriety by shrieking about the world stupendous commonplaces about the house where Shakespeare was born. It has been taken up by a number of people, theatrical and other, who, with the exception of Macready, have many of them the same petty personal objects in view. Those whose profession compels them, by the absolute necessity of its conditions, to garble and hack and desecrate works which else could not be fit for acting purposes (a fact which in itself sets forth what theatrical representation really is and always must be—do read, à propos to this, Serlo's answer to Wilhelm Meister about the impossibility of representing dramatically a great poetical whole), and who now, on this very Shakespearian Memorial night, instead of acting some one of his plays in its integrity, and taking zealously any the most insignificant part in it, have arranged a series of truncated, isolated scenes, that the actors may each be the hero or heroine of their own bit of Shakespeare.... This is all I know of the immediate destinies of Covent Garden. They have written to me to act the dying scene of Queen Katharine, to which I have agreed, not choosing to decline any part assigned me in this "Celebration," little as I sympathize with it.

If I should hear anything further, as I very likely may, from Henry Greville, of the probable fate of Covent Garden next season, I will let you know, that you may dispose accordingly of your property in it.

I have finished the "Vestiges of Creation." I became more reconciled to the theory it presents towards the close of the book, for obvious reasons. Of course, when, abandoning his positive chain (as he conceives it) of proved progression, after leading the whole universe from inorganic matter up to the "paragon of animals," the climax of development, man, he goes on to say that it is impossible to limit the future progress, or predict the future destinies of this noble human result, he forsakes his own ground of material demonstration, on which he has jumped, as the French say, à [peds] joints, over many an impediment, and relieves himself (and me) by the hypothesis, which, after all, in no way belongs peculiarly to his system, that other and higher destinies, developments, may, and probably do, await humanity than anything it has yet attained here: a theory which, though most agreeable to the love of life and desire of perfection of most human creatures, in no sort hinges logically on to his absolute chain of material progression and development. From the moment, however, that he admitted this view, instead of the one which I think legitimately belongs to his theory, irreconcilable as it seemed to me with what preceded it, the book became less distasteful to me, although I do not think the soundness of his theory (even admitting all his facts, which I am quite too ignorant to dispute) established by his work. Supposing his premises to be all correct, I think he does not make out his own case satisfactorily; and many of the conclusions in particular instances appear to me to be tacked or basted (to speak womanly) together loosely and clumsily, and yet with an effect of more mutual relation, coherence, and cohesion than really belongs to them.

Mr. Combe is delighted with the book—because it quotes him and his brother, and professes a belief in phrenology; but Mr. Combe himself allowed that the main proposition of the work is not logically deduced from its arguments, and moreover admitted that though well versed in all the branches of natural science, the author was perfectly master of none. He attributes the authorship to his friend Robert Chambers, or perhaps to the joint labor of him and his brother William. If his surmise in this respect is true there would be obvious reasons why they should not acknowledge so heterodox a book, especially in Edinburgh.