Chapter 25
I have been waiting to answer your most kind and interesting letter, dear Mr. Fields, until I could announce to you a publication that Mr. Colburn has been meditating and pressing me for, but which, chiefly I believe from my own fault in not going to town, and not liking to give him or Mr. Shoberl the trouble of coming here, is now probably adjourned to the autumn. The fact is that I have been and still am very poorly. We are stricken in our vanities, and the only things that I recollect having ever been immoderately proud of--my garden and my personal activity--have both now turned into causes of shame and pity; the garden, declining from one bad gardener to worse, has become a ploughed field,--and I myself, from a severe attack of rheumatism, and since then a terrible fright in a pony-chaise, am now little better than a cripple. However, if there be punishment here below, there are likewise consolations,--everybody is kind to me; I retain the vivid love of reading, which is one of the highest pleasures of life; and very interesting persons come to see me sometimes, from both sides of the water,--witness, dear Mr. Fields, our present correspondence. One such person arrived yesterday in the shape of Doctor ----, who has been working musical miracles in Scotland, (think of making singing teachers of children of four or five years of age!) and is now on his way to Paris, where, having been during seven years one of the editors of the National, he will find most of his colleagues of the newspaper filling the highest posts in the government. What is the American opinion of that great experiment; or, rather, what is yours? I wish it success from the bottom of my heart, but I am a, little afraid, from their total want of political economy (we have not a school-girl so ignorant of the commonest principles of demand and supply as the whole of the countrymen of Turgot from the executive government downwards), and from a certain warlike tendency which seems to me to pierce through all their declarations of peace. We hear the flourish of trumpets through all the fine phrases of the orators, and indeed it is difficult to imagine what they will do with their _soi-disant ouvriers_,--workmen who have lost the habit of labor,--unless they make soldiers of them. In the mean time some friends of mine are about to accompany your countryman Mr. Elihu Burritt as a deputation, and doubtless M. de Lamartine will give them as eloquent an answer as heart can desire,--no doubt he will keep peace if he can,--but the government have certainly not hitherto shown firmness or vigor enough to make one rely upon them, if the question becomes pressing and personal. In Italy matters seem to be very promising. We have here one of the Silvio Pellico exiles,--Count Carpinetta,--whose story is quite a romance. He is just returned from Turin, where he was received with enthusiasm, might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover some of his property, confiscated years ago by the Austrians. It does one's heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred to real life. _Apropos_ of public events, all London is talking of the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming, who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in 1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 at all events.
Ever yours, M.R.M.
(No date, 1849)
DEAR MR. FIELDS: I must have seemed very ungrateful in being so long silent. But your magnificent present of books, beautiful in every sense of the word, has come dropping in volume by volume, and only arrived complete (Mr. Longfellow's striking book being the last) about a fortnight ago, and then it found me keeping my room, as I am still doing, with a tremendous attack of neuralgia on the left side of the face. I am getting better now by dint of blisters and tonic medicine; but I can answer for that disease well deserving its bad eminence of "painful." It is however, blessed be God! more manageable than it used to be; and my medical friend, a man of singular skill, promises me a cure.
I have seen things of Longfellow's as fine as anything in Campbell or Coleridge or Tennyson or Hood. After all, our great lyrical poets are great only for half a volume. Look at Gray and Collins, at your own edition of the man whom one song immortalized, at Gerald Griffin, whom you perhaps do not know, and at Wordsworth, who, greatest of the great for about a hundred pages, is drowned in the flood of his own wordiness in his longer works. To be sure, there are giants who are rich to overflowing through a whole shelf of books,--Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and Americans, above all,--and I think the much that they did, and did well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron. Have you happened to see Bulwer's King Arthur? It astonished me very much. I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain way, he would never be a poet. Indeed, he is beginning poetry just at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off. But he is a strange person, full of the powerful quality called _will_, and has produced a work which, although it is not at all in the fashionable vein and has made little noise, has yet extraordinary merit. When I say that it is more like Ariosto than any other English poem that I know, I certainly give it no mean praise.
Everybody is impatient for Mr. George Ticknor's work. The subject seems to me full of interest. Lord Holland made a charming book of Lope de Vega years ago, and Mr. Ticknor, with equal qualifications and a much wider field, will hardly fail of delighting England and America. Will you remember me to him most gratefully and respectfully? He is a man whom no one can forget. As to Mr. Prescott, I know no author now, except perhaps Mr. Macaulay, whose works command so much attention and give so much delight. I am ashamed to send you so little news, but I live in the country and see few people. The day I caught my terrible Tic I spent with the great capitalist, Mr. Goldsmidt, and Mr. Cobden and his pretty wife. He is a very different person from what one expects,--graceful, tasteful, playful, simple, and refined, and looking absolutely young. I suspect that much of his power springs from his genial character. I heard last week from Mrs. Browning; she and her husband are at the Baths of Lucca. Mr. Kenyon's graceful book is out, and I must not forget to tell you that "Our Village" has been printed by Mr. Bohn in two volumes, which include the whole five. It is beautifully got up and very cheap, that is to say, for 3 _s._ 6 _d._ a volume. Did Mr. Whittier send his works, or do I owe them wholly to your kindness? If he sent them, I will write by the first opportunity. Say everything for me to your young friend, and believe me ever, dear Mr. F---- most faithfully and gratefully yours, M.R.M.
1850.
(No date.)
I have to thank you very earnestly, dear Mr. Fields, for two very interesting books. The "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal" are, I suppose, a sort of Lady Willoughby's Diary, so well executed that they read like one of the imitations of Defoe,--his "Memoirs of a Cavalier," for instance, which always seemed to me quite as true as if they had been actually written seventy years before. Thank you over and over again for these admirable books and for your great kindness and attention. What a perfectly American name Peabody is! And how strange it is that there should be in the United States so many persons of English descent whose names have entirely disappeared from the land of their fathers. Did you get my last unworthy letter? I hope you did. It would at all events show that there was on my part no intentional neglect, that I certainly had written in reply to the last letter that I received, although doubtless a letter had been lost on one side or the other. I live so entirely in the quiet country that I have little to tell you that can be interesting. Two things indeed, not generally known, I may mention: that Stanfield Hall, the scene of the horrible murder of which you have doubtless read, was the actual birthplace of Amy Robsart,--of whose tragic end, by the way, there is at last an authentic account, both in the new edition of Pepys and the first volume of the "Romance of the Peerage"; and that a friend of mine saw the other day in the window of a London bookseller a copy of Hume, ticketed "An Excellent Introduction to Macaulay." The great man was much amused at this practical compliment, as well he might be. I have been reading the autobiographies of Lamartine and Chateaubriand, as well as Raphael, which, although not avowed, is of course and most certainly a continuation of "Les Confiances." What strange beings these Frenchmen are! Here is M. de Lamartine at sixty, poet, orator, historian, and statesman, writing the stories of two ladies--one of them married--who died for love of him! Think if Mr. Macaulay should announce himself as a lady-killer, and put the details not merely into a book, but into a feuilleton!
The Brownings are living quite quietly at Florence, seeing, I suspect, more Americans than English. Mrs. Trollope has lost her only remaining daughter; arrived in England only time enough to see her die.
Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; say everything for me to Mr. and Mrs. Ticknor, and Mr. and Mrs. Norton. How much I should like to see you!
Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.
(February, 1850.)
You will have thought me either dead or dying, my dear Mr. Fields, for ungrateful I hope you could not think me to such a friend as yourself, but in truth I have been in too much trouble and anxiety to write. This is the story: I live alone, and my servants become, as they are in France, and ought, I think, always to be, really and truly part of my family. A most sensible young woman, my own maid, who waits upon me and walks out with me, (we have another to do the drudgery of our cottage,) has a little fatherless boy who is the pet of the house. I wonder whether you saw him during the glimpse we had of you! He is a fair-haired child of six years old, singularly quick in intellect, and as bright in mind and heart and temper as a fountain in the sun. He is at school in Reading, and, the small-pox raging there like a pestilence, they sent him home to us to be out of the way. The very next week my man-servant was seized with it, after vaccination of course. Our medical friend advised me to send him away, but that was, in my view of things, out of the question; so we did the best we could,--my own maid, who is a perfect Sister of Charity in all cases of illness, sitting up with him for seven nights following, for one or two were requisite during the delirium, and we could not get a nurse for love or money, and when he became better, then, as we had dreaded, our poor little boy was struck down. However, it has pleased God to spare him, and, after a long struggle, he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for, although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty severe cases, after vaccination, in our immediate neighborhood, five of them fatal. I had been inoculated after the old style, my maid had had the small-pox the natural way and the only one who escaped was a young girl who had been vaccinated three times, the last two years ago. Forgive this long story; it was necessary to excuse my most unthankful silence, and may serve as an illustration of the way a disease, supposed to be all but exterminated, is making head again in England.
Thank you a thousand and a thousand times for your most delightful books. Mr. Whipple's Lectures are magnificent, and your own Boston Book could not, I think, be beaten by a London Book, certainly not approached by the collected works of any other British city,--Edinburgh, for example.
Mr. Bennett is most grateful for your kindness, and Mrs. Browning will be no less enchanted at the honor done her husband. It is most creditable to America that they think more of our thoughtful poets than the English do themselves.
Two female friends of mine--Mrs. Acton Tindal, a young beauty as well as a woman of genius, and a Miss Julia Day, whom I have never seen, but whose verses show extraordinary purity of thought, feeling, and expression--have been putting forth books. Julia Day's second series she has done me the honor to inscribe to me, notwithstanding which I venture to say how very much I admire it, and so I think would you. Henry Chorley is going to be a happy man. All his life long he has been dying to have a play acted, and now he has one coming out at the Surrey Theatre, over Blackfriars Bridge. He lives much among fine people, and likes the notion of a Faubourg audience. Perhaps he is right. I am not at all afraid of the play, which is very beautiful,--a blank-verse comedy full of truth and feeling. I don't know if you know Henry Chorley. He is the friend of Robert Browning, and the especial favorite of John Kenyon, and has always been a sort of adopted nephew of mine. Poor Mrs. Hemans loved him well; so did a very different person, Lady Blessington,--so that altogether you may fancy him a very likeable person; but he is much more,--generous, unselfish, loyal, and as true as steel, worth all his writings a thousand times over. If my house be in such condition as to allow of my getting to London to see "Old Love and New Fortune," I shall consult with Mr. Lucas about the time of sitting to him for a portrait, as I have promised to do; for, although there be several extant, not one is passably like. John Lucas is a man of so much taste that he will make a real old woman's picture of it, just with my every-day look and dress.
Will you make my most grateful thanks to Mr. Whipple, and also to the author of "Greenwood Leaves," which I read with great pleasure, and say all that is kindest and most respectful for me to Mr. and Mrs. George Ticknor. I shall indeed expect great delight from his book.
Ever, dear Mr. Fields, most gratefully yours,
M.R.M.
We have had a Mr. Richmond here, lecturing and so forth. Do you know him? I can fancy what Mr. Webster would be on the Hungarian question. To hear Mr. Cobden talk of it was like the sound of a trumpet.
Three-mile Cross, November 25, 1850.
I have been waiting day after day, dear Mr. Fields, to send you two books,--one new, the other old,--one by my friend, Mr. Bennett; the other a volume [her Dramatic Poems] long out of print in England, and never, I think, known in America. I had great difficulty in procuring the shabby copy which I send you, but I think you will like it because it is mine, and comes to you from friend to friend, and because there is more of myself, that is, of my own inner feelings and fancies, than one ever ventures to put into prose. Mr. Bennett's volume, which is from himself as well as from me, I am sure you will like; most thoroughly would like each other if ever you met. He has the poet's heart and the poet's mind, large, truthful, generous, and full of true refinement, delightful as a companion, and invaluable as a man.
After eight years' absolute cessation of composition, Henry Chorley, of the Athenaeum, coaxed me last summer into writing for a Lady's Journal, which he was editing for Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, certain Readings of Poetry, old and new, which will, I suppose, form two or three separate volumes when collected, buried as they now are amongst all the trash and crochet-work and millinery. They will be quite as good as MS., and, indeed, every paper will be enlarged and above as many again added. One pleasure will be the doing what justice I can to certain American poets,--Mr. Whittier, for instance, whose "Massachusetts to Virginia" is amongst the finest things ever written. I gave one copy to a most intelligent Quaker lady, and have another in the house at this moment for Mrs. Walter, widow and mother of the two John Walters, father and son, so well known as proprietors of the Times. I shall cause my book to be immediately forwarded to you, but I don't think it will be ready for a twelvemonth. There is a good deal in it of my own prose, and it takes a wider range than usual of poetry, including much that has never appeared in any of the specimen books. Of course, dear friend, this is strictly between you and me, because it would greatly damage the work to have the few fragments that have appeared as yet brought forward without revision and completion in their present detached and crude form.
This England of ours is all alight and aflame with Protestant indignation against popery; the Church of England being likely to rekindle the fires of 1780, by way of vindicating the right of private judgment. I, who hold perfect freedom of thought and of conscience the most precious of all possessions, have of course my own hatred to these things. Cardinal Wiseman has taken advantage of the attack to put forth one of the most brilliant appeals that has appeared in my time; of course you will see it in America.
Professor Longfellow has won a station in England such as no American poet ever held before, and assuredly he deserves it. Except Beranger and Tennyson, I do not know any living man who has written things so beautiful. I think I like his Nuremburg best of all. Mr. Ticknor's great work, too, has won golden opinions, especially from those whose applause is fame; and I foresee that day by day our literature will become more mingled with rich, bright novelties from America, not reflections of European brightness, but gems all colored with your own skies and woods and waters. Lord Carlisle, the most accomplished of our ministers and the most amiable of our nobles, is giving this very week to the Leeds Mechanics' Institute a lecture on his travels in the United States, and another on the poetry of Pope.
May I ask you to transmit the accompanying letter to Mrs. H----? She has sent to me for titles and dates, and fifty things in which I can give her little help; but what I do know about my works I have sent her. Only, as, except that I believe her to live in Philadelphia, I really am as ignorant of her address as I am of the year which brought forth the first volume of "Our Village," I am compelled to go to you for help in forwarding my reply.
Ever, my dear Mr. Fields, most gratefully and faithfully yours,
M.R. MITFORD.
Is not Louis Napoleon the most graceful of our European chiefs? I have always had a weakness for the Emperor, and am delighted to find the heir of his name turning out so well.
1851.
February 10, 1851
I cannot tell you, my dear Mr. Fields, how much I thank you for your most kind letter and parcel, which, after sending three or four emissaries all over London to seek, (Mr. ---- having ignored the matter to my first messenger,) was at last sent to me by the Great Western Railway,--I suspect by the aforesaid Mr. ----, because, although the name of the London bookseller was dashed out, a _long-tailed_ letter was left just where the "p" would come in ----, and as neither Bonn's nor Whittaker's name boasts such a grace, I suspect that, in spite of his assurance, the packet was in the Strand, and neither in Ave Maria Lane nor in Henrietta Street, to both houses I sent. Thank you a thousand times for all your kindness. The orations are very striking. But I was delighted with Dr. Holmes's poems for their individuality. How charming a person he must be! And how truly the portrait represents the mind, the lofty brow full of thought, and the wrinkle of humor in the eye! (Between ourselves, I always have a little doubt of genius where there is no humor; certainly in the very highest poetry the two go together,--Scott, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Burns.) Another charming thing in Dr. Holmes is, that every succeeding poem is better than the last. Is he a widower, or a bachelor, or a married man? At all events, he is a true poet, and I like him all the better for being a physician,--the one truly noble profession. There are noble men in all professions, but in medicine only are the great mass, almost the whole, generous, liberal, self-denying, living to advance science and to help mankind. If I had been a man I should certainly have followed that profession. I rejoice to hear of another Romance by the author of "The Scarlet Letter." That is a real work of genius. Have you seen "Alton Locke"? No novel has made so much noise for a long time; but it is, like "The Saint's Tragedy," inconclusive. Between ourselves, I suspect that the latter part was written with the fear of the Bishop before his eyes (the author, Mr. Kingsley, is a clergyman of the Church of England), which makes the one volume almost a contradiction of the others. Mrs. Browning is still at Florence, where she sees scarcely any English, a few Italians, and many Americans.
Ever most gratefully yours.
M.R.M.
(No date.)