What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that
I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865.

I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was in heart, in disposition—in a word, in soul—would be a far more difficult task.

In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly exceptional portion of her intellectual constitution. The often cited dictum, les races se feminisent was not exemplified in her case. From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very pronounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little else. From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture, she drew much more. How far, if in any degree, this fact may be supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect, with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological inquirers. In bodily constitution her inheritance from her father's mother was most marked. To that source must be traced, I conceive, the delicacy of constitution, speaking medically, which deprived me of her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were of thoroughly healthy and strong constitutions. But if it may be suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised her. I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of her mother's ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by the bedside placed her hand on the dying woman's forehead were, "Ah, that is Theo's little Indian hand," And truly the slender delicacy of hand and foot, which characterised her, were unmistakably due to her Indian descent. In person she in nowise resembled either father or mother, unless it were possibly her father in the conformation and shape of the teeth.

[Footnote 1: But this she might also have got from her father, who was passionately fond of music, and was a very respectable performer on the violin.]

I have already in a previous chapter of these reminiscences given a letter from Mrs. Browning in which she speaks of Theodosia's "multiform faculty." And the phrase, which so occurring, might in the case of almost any other writer be taken as a mere epistolary civility, is in the case of one whose absolute accuracy of veracity never swerved a hair's-breadth, equivalent to a formal certificate of the fact to the best of her knowledge. And she knew my wife well both before and after the marriage of either of them. Her faculty was truly multiform.

She was not a great musician; but her singing had for great musicians a charm which the performances of many of their equals in the art failed to afford them. She had never much voice, but I have rarely seen the hearer to whose eyes she could not bring the tears. She had a spell for awakening emotional sympathy which I have never seen surpassed, rarely indeed equalled.

For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of her own, and astonishingly apt in acquiring—not merely the use for speaking as well as reading purposes, but—the delicacies of other tongues. Of Italian, with which she was naturally most conversant, she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly competent critic.

She published, now many years ago, in the Athenaeum, some translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done. But none save the very few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost—but eventually not quite—impossible to render to her satisfaction.

She published a translation of Niccolini's Arnaldo da Brescia, which won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet. And neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friendship were easily won. He was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think, somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians. But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.

She translated a number of the curiously characteristic stornelli of Tuscany, and especially of the Pistoja mountains. And here again it is impossible to make any one, who has never been familiar with these stornelli understand the especial difficulty of translating them. Of course the task was a slighter and less significant one than that of translating Giusti, nor was the same degree of critical accuracy and nicety in rendering shades of meaning called for. But there were not—are not—many persons who could cope with the especial difficulties of the attempt as successfully as she did. She produced also a number of pen-and-ink drawings illustrating these stornelli, which I still possess, and in which the spirited, graphic, and accurately truthful characterisation of the figures could only have been achieved by an artist very intimately acquainted intus et in cute with the subjects of her pencil.