Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Ever yours truly,

F. A. B.

[Mrs. Jameson paid us a short, sad visit, and returned to Europe with the bitter disappointment of her early life confirmed, to resume her honorable and laborious career of literary industry. Her private loss was the public gain. When next we met, it was in England.]

Branchtown, Friday, December 29th, 1837.

My Dear Lady Dacre,

Doubtless you have long ago accounted your kind letter lost, for I am sure you would not imagine that I could have received, and yet so long delayed to answer it: yet so it is; and I hardly know how to account for it, for the receipt of your letter gratified and touched me very much; the more so, probably, that my father and mother hardly ever write to any of us, and so a letter from any one much my senior always seems to me a condescension; and though I may have appeared so, believe me, I am not ungrateful for your kindness in making the effort of writing to me....

GOETHE ON THINKING. I wish it were in my power to give you a decent excuse for not having written sooner, but the more I reflect, the less I can think what I have been doing; yet I have been, and am, busy incessantly from morning to night, about nothing. My whole life passes in trifling activities, and small recurring avocations, which do not each seem to occupy an hour, and yet at last weigh down the balance of the twenty-four. I cannot name the thing I do, and but that our thoughts are to be revealed at the Day of Judgment, I should on that occasion be in the knife-grinder's case: "Story! Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" for except ordering my dinner (and eating it), and riding on horseback every day, I have no distinct idea of any one thing I accomplish. Mine is not a life of much excitement, yet the time goes, and all the more rapidly, perhaps, that it flows with uninterrupted monotony. I neither read, write, nor cast up accounts; and shall soon have to begin again with the first elements. Do you not think that an ignorance, unbroken even by the slightest tincture of these, would be rather a fine thing for one's original powers? If one did nothing but a "deal of thinking," perhaps one's thinking might be something worth. Is it not Goethe who says: "Thought expands and weakens the mind; action contracts and strengthens it"? If this be true, mine should be an intellect of vast extent, and too shallow to drown a fly....

Do you know that I consider pain and disease as inventions of our own; and every death unnatural, but that gradual decay of all the faculties, and cessation of all the functions, which is, as we manage matters now, the rarest termination of human existence? Therefore, besides pitying people when they are ill, I blame them too, unless their suffering be an inheritance, the visitation of God, even unto the third and fourth generation, for disobedience to His wise and beneficent laws. One would think, if this belief in hereditary retribution was real, instead of a mere profession, people would be thoughtful, if not for themselves, at least for those to whom they are to transmit a healthy or diseased nature; one sees so much sin and so much suffering, the manifest causes of which lie at our own doors....

Thank you for your account of Lady Beecher; she always made a most pleasing impression upon me. I think, however you must be mistaken in saying that she and I excited our audiences alike: I should think that impossible in such very dissimilar actresses as we must have been. The quantity of effect produced, of course I cannot judge of; but it seems to me, from what I have seen and known of her off the stage, that the quality must have been essentially different. This theme, however, should not be begun in the corner of a letter already too long.

Your letter was brought to me into the Harrisburg Convention, whose sessions I once or twice attended. That Convention was very funny, and very strange, and very interesting too; I've a great mind to write Lord Dacre an account of it, because, you know, you disclaim being a "political lady," though I presume you admit that he is a "political lord." And that reminds me that no democrat would accept your three-legged stool and its inferences [Lady Dacre had compared the stability of our Government, by the Sovereign, the Lords, and the Commons, to a solid, three-legged stool, contrasting it disadvantageously with that of the United States], for nature scorns plurality of means where one suffices; and the broadest shadowing tree needs but one stem, if the root be deep and widespread enough. This is merely by the way, for I am as little "political" as you are.