Fanny Kemble.
Emil Devrient's was the best Hamlet I ever saw. It would not have been if my father's had not been too smooth and harmonious. I hope I shall see Fechter's.
Lenox, Thursday, October 11.
How good an inspiration it was that made you send that beautiful photograph to me! It came to me really like a special providence, on the day when I had parted from my children for an indefinite time, and with more than usual sadness and anxiety; for my eldest child's health has failed completely since her confinement, and she came to me for a visit of ten days only, looking like the doomed, wan image of some woman whose enemies were wasting her by witchcraft. My small comfortless home was intolerably lonely to me, and towards sunset I went out to find some fortitude under the open sky. I wandered into a copse of beech trees that clothe the steep sides of a miniature ravine with a brook at the bottom, and here gathered a handful of the beautiful blue fringed gentian (do you know that exquisite flower that grows wild in the woods here?). The little glen with its clusters of mysterious blue blossoms was all but dark, but, emerging from it, I stood where I saw a wide valley flooded with the evening light, and hills beyond rising in waves of amber and smoke colour and dark purple; it was so beautiful that it cannot be imagined. The autumn has turned all the trees into gold and jewels, like the enchanted growth of fairy-land, and the whole world, as I saw it from the entrance of that shadowy dell, looked as if it was made of precious metals and precious stones. I was very sad, and stood thinking of our Saviour and the widow of Nain, and how pitiful He was to sorrowful human creatures, and with some sparks of comfort in my heart I returned home, where I found your letter waiting for me. I have told you all this of my previous state of mind and feeling, because—without knowing that—you could not conceive how like an express message of consolation your work appeared to me. May it be blessed to many hearts for admonition and for consolation as it was to mine, dear Mr. Leighton. It is no wonder that it seemed to me beautiful, and I do not think I shall ever sufficiently disconnect it with this first impression, to be able to judge of its merit as a work of art; it was, as I said before, a special Providence to me. I long to have it framed and hung where I can see it constantly. I have within the last few days moved into a house which I have hired for the next two years. It is all but in the village of Lenox, and yet so situated that it commands from the windows of every room a most beautiful prospect. The whole landscape is a harmonious confusion of small valleys and hills, rolling and falling within and around and beyond each other, like folds of rich and majestic drapery. Oh, what lights and shadows roam and rest over these hill-sides and in the hollows between them! The country is very thickly wooded, and the woods are literally of every colour in the rainbow, all mixed together under a sky, the peculiar characteristic of which is not so much softness or brightness, as a transparent purity that seems as if there was no atmosphere betwixt oneself and the various objects one sees. I expect this would make it difficult to paint these beautiful aspects of nature here; but, oh, how I do wish you could see it, for, in the matter of American autumnal colouring, seeing alone is believing. The house itself is very tolerably comfortable, but hideous to behold both within and without; and I have begun my residence in it under rather depressing circumstances, i.e. without being able to obtain the necessary servants for the decent comfort of my daily existence. Ever since the beginning of May I have been endeavouring, in vain, to procure and keep together a decent household. Not for one single week have I had my proper complement of people in the house, and I have done every species of house-work myself, from cleaning the cellar and kitchen to washing the tea-cups; it is a state of things as incredible as the colour of the autumn woods, and as peculiar, thank God, to America. I am now making my last experiment by trying coloured servants. Their manners and deportment are generally much better than those of either the Irish or American, and they seem capable of personal attachment to their employers, which neither of the other races are. The incessant worry, discomfort, and positive fatigue that I have undergone during the whole summer has completely shaken my nerves, so that I have been in a sort of hysterical condition of constant weeping for some time past. I trust, however, it will not be so wretched now, for I am at any rate close to the village inn, and if I am left without servants, can go there and get some food; it is a state of existence qu'on ne s'imagine pas. You will not wonder, after all this, to hear that I declined a ticket to the Prince's ball at New York, to which the whole population of the United States are struggling to get admittance; but at the best of times "I am not gamesome," and feel as if I had swept my own rooms quite too recently to be fit company for my Queen's son. Thank you, dear Mr. Leighton, for all you tell me about my sister and the children; she never writes, you know, and so I am thirsty all the time for some tidings of her. It is very sad to be so far away and hear so seldom from those one loves. Good-bye, God bless you; and thank you once more for the "Vision." I am sorry I cannot tell you of the sale of either of your pictures; they are in the Boston Athenæum, very safe, and highly ornamental to it, but not, I regret to say, sold. If you wish me to do anything more about them, you must write me your directions, which I will fulfil with every attention and accuracy of which I am capable.
Lenox, Sunday, November 11.
I trust before long you will receive your children safe and sound. I wish the two hundred pounds I have lost this year had been invested in one of those pictures instead of in St. Louis. Thank you for your account of Adelaide and her children; it is not much, but it is all that much better than nothing. The state of the country is very sad, and any probable termination of the war quite out of calculable distance. England, no doubt, will maintain her absolute neutrality in spite of secession, cotton, and anti-slavery sympathies; it is her only part. Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton.
I beg you will not scruple to write me now if there is anything more that I can do, either in the matter of the pictures or any other by which I can be of use to you here.
New York,
Sunday, March 10.
I am sure you have not forgotten the charming farmhouse at West Mion, to which you and your sketch-book were the means of introducing us, —— farm: well, his brother is one of the richest shopkeepers in New York—and, upon the strength of my visit to the paternal acres in Hampshire, his wife, a funny little specimen of vivacious vulgarity, called upon me, and I, of course, upon her. I was shown into a drawing-room at least thirty feet long, with two massive white marble chimney-pieces, green silk brocade curtains and furniture to match, magnificent carpets, mirrors, gildings, hideous works in marble on scagliola pillars—in short, the most marvellous palace of shopkeepers' beaux ideaux that you can conceive; through this to a beautifully fitted-up library; through this to a picture gallery, noble seigneur, pensez y bien! Oh, my dear Frederic Leighton, it was enough to make one fall down and foam at the mouth, to see such a hideous collection of daubs and to think of the money hanging on those walls; and then I thought of your pictures, and why the wretched man couldn't have procured them for some of his foolish money; and then I begged your pardon internally for the desecration of imagining your pictures in such company; and then I gazed amusedly about me, and at length gave tongue: "Mr. ——," said I, "this is a vastly different residence from the old homestead in Hampshire." The worthy man could not see in my heart which way the balance of preference inclined, and answered with benignant self-satisfaction: "Ah, well, you see, ma'am, they've been going on there for the last I don't know how many hundred years, just about in the same social position; they haven't a notion of the rapidity of our progress here." I hate to advise you to have your pictures back, for there really does seem to me to be a greedy desire for pictures (I cannot qualify in any other way the taste which covets and buys such things) here; but I suppose pictures, at any rate, must be what these people want, and will not buy dear and good ones, when cheap and nasty do as well. I think, while I am here in New York, I shall take the liberty of making some further inquiry as to whether the great print and picture seller here does not think they could be seen to selling advantage in his shop; in short, it throws me into a melancholy rage to think what pictures are bought while yours are not. The state of this country is curious—strange and deplorable beyond precedent in history, it seems to me; and it is absolutely impossible to foresee to what issue things are tending. The opinions one hears are all coloured by the particular bias of the speaker, and the confusion is so great in the general excitement of sectional partisanship that even one of the members—and a very influential one—of the peace convention sent to Washington for the purpose of proposing terms of conciliation—which should not, however, compromise the Northern principles—said that nothing had been done, that all was "sound and fury, and signifying nothing"—or if anything at present, the confirmed secession of the Southern, the disruption from the North of the Northern slave States, and, not impossibly, civil war. Of course, the more time elapses in palavering before the first fatal blow is struck, the less probability there is of its being struck at all; but, on the other hand, the longer the present state of things continues, the more accustomed people become to the idea of the dismemberment of the Union, and therefore, though the clangour of an appeal to arms diminishes, so I think does the prospect of anything like "making up" the family quarrel—indeed, if it were patched, and soldered to the very best, I do not believe that it will ever "hold water again"; but it is impossible to foresee from day to day what may be the turn of events.
If I live till a year from this summer I will be in England in July, and if I live till the November after that I will be in Rome, and you and Edward and Adelaide have my full permission to come too.