Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

I observed nothing peculiar about the direction of any letter that I have recently received from you; but then, to be sure, I am not given to the general process, which, general as it is, always astonishes me, of examining the direction, the date, the postmark, the signature, of the letter I receive (as many of these, too, as possible, before opening the epistle); I hasten to read your words as soon as I have them, and seldom speculate as to when or where they were written, so that I really do not know whether I have received your Hull letter or not. I do not go thither until Monday next, and return to town the following Sunday....

Oh, my dear, what a world is this! or rather, what an unlucky experience mine has been—in some respects—yes, in some respects! for while I write this, images of the good, and true, and excellent people I have known and loved rise like a cloud of witnesses to shut out the ugly vision of the moral deformity of some of those with whom my fate has been interwoven....

I have agreed with Mrs. Humphreys to take the apartments that T—— M—— had in King Street, from the beginning of January till the beginning of May. She says she cannot let me have them longer than that, but I shall endeavor for at least a month's extension, for it will be so very wretched to turn out and have to hunt for new lodgings, for a term of six weeks.

SUCCESS AT LEEDS. My success at Leeds was very good, considering the small size of the theatre.... I am not exempt from a feeling about "illustrious localities," but the world seems to me to be so absolutely Shakespeare's domain and dwelling-place, that I do not vividly associate him with the idea of those four walls, between which he first saw the light of an English day. If the house he dwelt in in the maturity of his age, and to which he retired to spend the evening of his life, still existed, I should feel considerable emotion in being where his hours and days were spent when his mind had reached its zenith.

A baby is the least intelligent form of a rational human being, and as it mercifully pleased God to remove His wonderfully endowed child before the approach of age had diminished his transcendent gifts, I do not care to contemplate him in that condition in which I cannot recognize him—that is, with an undeveloped and dormant intelligence.

We know nothing of his childhood, nothing of the gradual growth and unfolding of his genius; his acknowledged works date from the season of its ripe perfection.

You know I do not regret the dimness that covers the common details of his life: his humanity was allied to that of its kind by infirmities and sins, but I am glad that these links between him and me have disappeared, and that those alone remain by which he will be bound, as long as this world lasts, to the love and reverence of his fellow-beings. Shakespeare's childhood, boyhood, the season of his moral and intellectual growth, would be of the deepest interest could one know it: but Shakespeare's mere birthplace and babyhood is not much to me; though I quite agree that it should be respectfully preserved, and allowed to be visited by all who find satisfaction in such pilgrimage.

He could not have been different from other babies you know; nor, indeed, need be,—for a baby—any baby—is a more wonderful thing even than Shakespeare.

I have told you how curiously affected I was while standing by his grave, in the church at Stratford-upon-Avon: how I was suddenly overcome with sleep (my invariable refuge under great emotion or excitement), and how I prayed to be allowed to sleep for a little while on the altar-steps of the chancel, beside his bones: the power of association was certainly strong in me then; but his bones are there, and above them streamed a warm and brilliant sunbeam, fit emblem of his vivifying spirit;—but I have no great enthusiasm for his house....

Does not the power of conceiving in any degree the idea of God establish some relation between Him and the creature capable of any approach by thought to Him? Do we not, in some sense, possess mentally that which we most earnestly think of? is it not the possession over which earthly circumstances have the least power? The more incessantly and earnestly we think of a thing the more we become possessed by and of it, and in some degree assimilated to it; and can those thoughts which reach towards God alone fail to lay hold, in any sort or degree, of their object?...