Yesterday who should come to see me but Mr. James Martineau and his wife! I have the greatest admiration for him as a divine, and I do not know what I expected to see in the outward man. But I was well pleased with his aspect as I found it. He is not tall, and he is pale, though not thin, with the most perfectly simple manners and beautiful expression. It seemed as if he had always been my brother; as if I could find in him counselor, friend, saint, and sage; and I have no doubt it is so, so potent is the aroma of character, without a word or sign. How worse than folly it is to imagine that character can either be cried up or cried down! No veil can conceal, no blazonry exalt, either the good or the evil. A man has only to come in and sit down, and there he is, for better, for worse. I, at least, am always, as it were, hit by a person's sphere; and either the music of the spheres or the contrary supervenes, and sometimes also nothing at all, if there is not much strength of character. Mr. Martineau did not say much; but his voice was very pleasant and sympathetic, and he won regard merely by his manner of being. Mrs. Martineau sat with her back to the only dim light there was, and I could receive no impression from her face; but she seemed pleasant and friendly. Mrs. Martineau said she wished very much that we would go to her party on the 19th, which was their silver wedding day. She said we should meet Mrs. Gaskell, the author of "Mary Barton," "Ruth," and "Cranford," and several other friends. It is the greatest pity that we cannot go; but it would be madness to think of going out at night in these solid fogs with my cough. They live beyond Liverpool, in Prince's Park. Mrs. Martineau showed herself perfectly well-bred by not being importunate. It was a delightful call; and I feel as if I had friends indeed and in need just from that one interview. Mr. Martineau said Una would be homesick until she had some friends of her own age, and that he had a daughter a little older, who might do for one of them. They wished to see Mr. Hawthorne, and came pretty near it, for they could not have got out of the lodge gate before he came home! Was not that a shame?
I must tell you that there is a splendid show which Mr. Jerdan wants us to see at Lord Warremore de Tabley's; it is a vast salt mine of twenty acres, cut into a symmetrical columned gallery! He says it shall be lighted up, so that we shall walk in a diamond corridor. Mr. Jerdan said that salt used to be the medium of traffic in those districts; and I think Lord de Tabley [1] is a beauty for having his mines cut in the form of art, instead of hewed and hacked as a Vandal would have done. Mr. Jerdan said that on account of some circumstance he was called Lord de Tableau for a pseudonym, and in the sense I have heard people exclaim to a good child, "Oh, you picture!"
[1] Mr. Hawthorne's severe taste is annoyed by that expression, but I must let it go for the sake of what follows.
In the "North British Review" this week is a review of Mr. Hawthorne's three last romances. It gives very high praise.
December 18.
I went to Liverpool yesterday for a Christmas present for you, and got a silver pen in a pearl handle, which you will use for Una's sake. While I was gone, Mr. Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell called! I was very sorry to lose the visit. They left a note from the Misses Yates inviting us to dine to-day and stay all night, and go to Mrs. Martineau's evening party to-morrow! It would be a charming visitation, if it were possible. Mr. Bright cannot find language to express the Misses Yates' delightsomeness, and was wishing that we knew them.
By this steamer Mr. Ticknor has sent us a Christmas present of a barrel of apples. I wish you could see Rosebud with her bright cheeks and laughing eyes. A lady thought her four years old, the other day! Julian has to-day gone with his father to the Consulate. Una is in the drawing-room reading Miss Edgeworth. Rose is on the back of my chair.
On Christmas night the bells chimed in the dawn, beginning at twelve and continuing till daybreak. I wish you could hear this chiming of bells. It is the most joyful sound you can imagine,—the most hopeful, the most enlivening. I waked before light, and thought I heard some ineffable music. I thought of the song of the angels on that blessed morn; but while listening, through a sudden opening in the air, or breeze blowing towards us, I found it was not the angels, but the bells of Liverpool. One day when I was driving through Liverpool with Una and Julian, these bells suddenly broke forth on the occasion of a marriage, and I could scarcely keep the children in the carriage. They leaped up and down, and Una declared she would be married in England, if only to hear the chime of the bells. The mummers stood at our gate on Christmas morning and sang in the dawn, acting the part of the heavenly host. The Old Year was tolled out and the New Year chimed in also, and again the mummers sang at the gate.
Perhaps you have heard of Miss Charlotte Cushman, the actress? The summer before we left America, she sent a note to Mr. Hawthorne, requesting him to sit to a lady for his miniature, which she wished to take to England. Mr. Hawthorne could not refuse, though you can imagine his repugnance on every account. He went and did penance, and was then introduced to Miss Cushman. He liked her for a very sensible person with perfectly simple manners. The other day he met her in Liverpool, and she told him she had been intending to call on me ever since she had been at her sister's at Rose Hill Hall, Woolton, seven miles from Liverpool. Mr. Hawthorne wished me to invite her to dine and pass the night. I invited her to dine on the 29th of December. She accepted and came. I found her tall as her famous character, Meg Merrilies, with a face of peculiar, square form, most amiable in expression, and so very untheatrical in manner and bearing that I should never suspect her to be an actress. She has left the stage now two years, and retires upon the fortune she has made; for she was a very great favorite on the English stage, and retired in the height of her fame. The children liked her prodigiously, and Rose was never weary of the treasures attached to her watch-chain. I could not recount to you the gems clustered there,—such as a fairy tiny gold palette, with all the colors arranged; a tiny easel with a colored landscape, quarter of an inch wide; a tragic and comic mask, just big enough for a gnome; a cross of the Legion of Honor; a wallet, opening with a spring, and disclosing compartments just of a size for the Keeper of the Privy Purse of the Fairy Queen; a dagger for a pygmy; two minute daguerreotypes of friends, each as large as a small pea, in a gold case; an opera-glass; Faith, Hope, and Charity represented by a golden heart and anchor, and I forget what,—a little harp; I cannot remember any more. These were all, I think, memorials of friends. In the morning she sat down to 'Una's beautifully toned piano, and sang one of Lockhart's Spanish ballads, with eloquent expression, so as to make my blood tingle.
Hospitality was quite frequent now in our first English home, as many letters affirm. The delightful novelty to my small self of a peep at the glitter of little dinner-parties was as surprising to me as if I could have had a real consciousness of its contrast to all the former simplicity of my parents' life. Down the damask trooped the splendid silver covers, entrancingly catching a hundred reflections from candle-flame and cut-glass, and my own face as I hovered for a moment upon the scene while the butler was gliding hither and thither to complete his artistic arrangements. On my father's side of the family there had been a distinct trait of material elegance, appearing in such evidences as an exquisite tea-service, brought from China by my grandfather, with the intricate monogram and dainty shapes and decoration of a hundred years ago; and in a few chairs and tables that could not be surpassed for graceful design and finish; and so on. As for my mother's traits of inborn refinement, they were marked enough, but she writes of herself to her sister at this time, "You cannot think how I cannot be in the least tonish, such is my indomitable simplicity of style." Her opinion of herself was always humble; and I can testify to the distinguished figure she made as she wore the first ball-dress I ever detected her in. I was supposed to be fast asleep, and she had come to look at me before going out to some social function, as she has told me she never failed to do when leaving the house for a party. Her superb brocade, pale-tinted, low-necked, and short-sleeved, her happy, airy manner, her glowing though pale face, her dancing eyes, her ever-hovering smile of perfect kindness, all flashed upon me in the sudden light as I roused myself. I insisted upon gazing and admiring, yet I ended by indignantly weeping to find that my gentle little mother could be so splendid and wear so triumphant an expression. "She is frightened at my fine gown!" my mother exclaimed, with a changed look of self-forgetting concern; and I never lost the lesson of how much more beautiful her noble glance was than her triumphant one. A faded bill has been preserved, for the humor of it, from Salem days, in which it is recorded that for the year 1841 she ordered ten pairs of number two kid slippers,—which was not precisely economical for a young lady who needed to earn money by painting, and who denied herself a multitude of pleasures and comforts which were enjoyed by relatives and friends.