Records of a Girlhood

    Yours ever truly,
    F. A. K.

This and the preceding note refer to my benefit, of which, according to a not infrequent custom with the more popular members of the profession, I had undertaken to manage the business details, but found myself, as I have here stated, quite incompetent to encounter the worry of applications for boxes, and seats, and special places, etc., etc., and have never since, in the course of my whole public career, had anything to do with the management of my own affairs.

    Great Russell Street, March, 1831.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

I was not at home yesterday afternoon when you sent to our house, and all the evening was so busy studying that I had not time to answer your dispatch. Thank you for your last year's letter; it is curious to look back, even to so short a time, and see how the past affected one when it was the present. I remember I was very happy and comfortable at Bath, the critics notwithstanding. Thank you, too, for your more recent epistle. I am grateful for, and gratified by, your minute observation of my acting. I am always thankful for your criticisms, even when I do not quite agree with them; for I know that you are always kindly anxious that I should not destroy my own effects, which I believe I not unfrequently do. With regard to my action, unless in passages which necessarily require a specific gesture, such as, "You'll find them at the Marchesa Aldabella's," I never determine any one particular movement; and, of course, this must render my action different almost every time; and so it depends upon my own state of excitement and inspiration, so to speak, whether the gesture be forcible or not. My father desires me to send you Retsch's "Hamlet;" it is his, and I request you not to judge it too hastily: I have generally heard it abused, but I think in many parts it has very great merit. I am told that Retsch says he has no fancy for illustrating "Romeo and Juliet," which seems strange. One would have thought he would have delighted in portraying those lovely human beings, whom one always imagines endowed with an outward and visible form as youthful, beautiful, and full of grace, as their passion itself was. Surely the balcony, the garden, and grave-yard scenes, would have furnished admirable subjects for his delicate and powerful hand. Is it possible that he thinks the thing beyond him? I must go to work. Good-by.

    Ever yours truly,
    F. A. K.

You marked so many things in my manuscript book that I really felt ashamed to copy them all, for I should have filled more than half yours with my rhymes. I have just added to those I did transcribe a sonnet I wrote on Monday night after the play.

It may have been that the execution of "Faust," his masterpiece, disinclined Retsch for the treatment of another love story. He did subsequently illustrate "Romeo and Juliet" with much grace and beauty; but it is, as a whole, undoubtedly inferior to his illustrations of Goethe's tragical love story. Retsch's genius was too absolutely German to allow of his treating anything from any but a German point of view. Shakespeare, Englishman as he is, has written an Italian "Romeo and Juliet;" but Retsch's lovers are Teutonic in spite of their costume, and nowhere, as in the wonderful play, is the Southern passion made manifest through the Northern thought.

The private theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's play of "Hernani," full of fine and striking things, as well as of exaggerations verging on the ludicrous, had been most admirably rendered into rhymed verse by Lord Ellesmere. His translations from the German and his English version of "Faust," which was one of the first attempts to give a poetical rendering in our language of Goethe's masterpiece, had won him some literary reputation, and his rhymed translation of "Hernani" was a performance calculated to add to it considerably. He was a very accomplished and charming person; good and amiable, clever, cultivated, and full of fine literary and artistic taste. He was singularly modest and shy, with a gentle diffidence of manner and sweet, melancholy expression in his handsome face that did no justice to a keen perception of humor and relish of fun, which nobody who did not know him intimately would have suspected him of.

Of Lady Ellesmere I have already said that she was a sort of idol of mine in my girlhood, when first I knew her, and to the end of her life continued to be an object of my affectionate admiration. She was excellently conscientious, true, and upright; of a direct and simple integrity of mind and character which her intercourse with the great world to which she belonged never impaired, and which made her singular and unpopular in the artificial society of English high life. Her appearance always seemed to me strikingly indicative of her mind and character. The nobly delicate and classical outline of her face, her pure, transparent complexion, and her clear, fearless eyes were all outward and visible expressions of her peculiar qualities. Her beautifully shaped head and fine profile always reminded me of the Pallas Athene on some antique gem, and the riding cap with the visor, which she first made fashionable, increased the classical resemblance. She was curiously wanting in imagination, and I never heard anything more comically literal than her description of her own utter destitution of poetical taste. After challenging in vain her admiration for the great poets of our language, I quoted to her, not without misgiving, some charmingly graceful and tender lines, addressed to herself by her husband, and asked her if she did not like those: "Oh yes," replied she, "I think they are very nice, but you know I think they would be just as nice if they were not verses; and whenever I hear any poetry that I like at all, I always think how much better I should like it if it was prose;" an explanation of her taste that irresistibly reminded me of the delightful Frenchman's sentiment about spinach: "Je n'aime pas les épinards, et je suis si content que je ne les aime pas! parce que si je les aimais, j'en mangerais beaucoup, et je ne peux pas les souffrir."

My intercourse with Lady Ellesmere, which had been a good deal interrupted during the years I passed out of England, was renewed the year before her death, when I visited her at Hatchford, where she was residing in her widowhood, and where I promised her when I left her I would return and stay with her again, but was never fortunate enough to do so, her death occurring not long afterward.

During one of my last visits to Worsley Hall, Lord Ellesmere's seat in Lancashire, Lady Ellesmere had taken me all over the beautiful church they were building near their house, which was to be his and her final resting-place. After her death I made a pilgrimage to it for her sake, and when the service was over and the young members of the family had left their place of worship near the grave of their parents, I went into their chapel, where a fine monument with his life-sized effigy in marble had been dedicated to him by her love, and where close beside it and below it lay the marble slab on which her name was inscribed.

Our performance at Bridgewater House was highly successful and created a great sensation, and we repeated it three times for the edification of the great gay world of London, sundry royal personages included. Two of our company, Mr. Craven and Mr. St. Aubin, were really good actors; the rest were of a tolerably decent inoffensiveness. Mrs. Bradshaw, the charming Maria Tree of earlier days, accepted the few lines that had to be spoken by Donna Sol's duenna, and delivered the epilogue, which, besides being very graceful and playful, contains some lines for which I felt grateful to Lord Ellesmere's kindness, though he had certainly taken a poet's full license of embellishing his subject in his laudatory reference to his Donna Sol.

The whole thing amused me very much, and mixed up, as it soon came to be for me, with an element of real and serious interest, kept up the atmosphere of nervous excitement in which I was plunged from morning till night.

The play which Sheridan Knowles came to read to us was "The Hunchback." He had already produced several successful dramas, of which the most striking was Virginius, in which Mr. Macready performed the Roman father so finely. The play Knowles now read to us had been originally taken by him to Drury Lane in the hope and expectation that Kean would accept the principal man's part of Master Walter. Various difficulties and disagreements arising, however, about the piece, the author brought it to my father; and great was my emotion and delight in hearing him read it. From the first moment I felt sure that it would succeed greatly, and that I should be able to do justice to the part of the heroine, and I was anxious with my father for its production. The verdict of the Green Room was not, however, nearly as favorable as I had expected; and I was surprised to find that when the piece was read to the assembled company it was received with considerable misgiving as to its chance of success.

CHAPTER XXI

It is very curious that their experience tells so little among theatrical people in their calculation of the probable success of a new piece; perhaps it may be said that they cannot positively foresee the effect each actor or actress may produce with certain parts; but given the best possible representation of the piece, the precise temper of the particular audience who decides its fate on the first night of representation is always an unknown quantity in the calculation, and no technical experience ever seems to arrive at anything like even approximate certainty with regard to that. I felt perfectly sure of the success of "The Hunchback," but I think that was precisely because of my want of theatrical experience, which left me rather in the position of one of the public than one of the players, and there was much grave head-shaking over it, especially on the part of our excellent stage-manager, Mr. Bartley, who was exceedingly faint-hearted about the experiment.

My father, with great professional disinterestedness, took the insignificant part of the insignificant lover, and Knowles himself filled that of the hero of the piece, the hunchback; a circumstance which gave the part a peculiar interest, and compensated in some measure for the loss of the great genius of Kean, for whom it had been written.

The same species of uncertainty which I have said characterizes the judgments of actors with regard to the success of new pieces sometimes affects the appreciation authors themselves form of the relative merits of their own works, inducing them to value more highly some which they esteem their best, and to which that pre-eminence is denied by popular verdict. Knowles, while writing "The Hunchback," was so absorbed with the idea of what Kean's impersonation of it would probably be, that he was entirely unconscious of what the great actor himself probably perceived, that on the stage the part of Julia would overweigh and eclipse that of Master Walter. Knowles felt sure he had written a fine man's part, and was really not aware that the woman's part was still finer. What is yet more singular is that while he was writing "The Wife," which he did immediately afterward, with a view to my acting the principal female character, he constantly said to me, "I am writing such a part for you!" and had no notion that the only part capable of any effect at all in the piece was that of Julian St. Pierre, the good-for-nothing brother of the duchess.

The play of "The Wife" was singularly wanting in interest, and except in the character of St. Pierre was ineffective and flat from beginning to end, in that respect a perfect contrast to "The Hunchback," in which the interest is vivid and strong, and never flags from the first scene to the last. I was quite unable to make anything at all of the part of Marianna, nor have I ever heard of its becoming prominent or striking in the hands of any one else.

"The Hunchback," according to my confident expectation, succeeded. Knowles played his own hero with great force and spirit, though he was in such a state of wild excitement that I expected to see him fly on the stage whenever he should have been off it, and vice versâ, and followed him about behind the scenes endeavoring to keep him in his right mind with regard to his exits and his entrances, and receiving from him explosive Irish benedictions in return for my warnings and promptings. Throughout the whole first representation I was really as nervous for and about him as I was about the play itself and my own particular part in it. My father did the impossible with Sir Thomas Clifford, in making him both dignified and interesting; and Miss Taylor was capital in the saucy Helen. My part played itself and was greatly liked by the audience; the piece was one of the most popular original plays of my time, and has continued a favorite alike with the public and the players. The part of the heroine is one, indeed, in which it would be almost impossible to fail; and every Julia may reckon upon the sympathy of her audience, the character is so pre-eminently effective and dramatic.

Of the play as a composition not much is to be said; it has little poetical or literary merit, and even the plot is so confused and obscure that nobody to my knowledge (not even the author himself, of whom I once asked an explanation of it) was ever able to make it out or give a plausible account of it. The characters are inconsistent and wanting in verisimilitude to a degree that ought to prove fatal to them with any tolerably reasonable spectators; in spite of all which the play is interesting, exciting, affecting, and humorous. The powerfully dramatic effect of the situations, and the two characters of Master Walter and Julia, the great scope for good acting in all the scenes in which they appear, the natural fire, passion, and pathos of the dialogue, in short the great merits of the piece as an acting play cover all its defects; even the heroine's vulgar, flighty folly and the hero's absurd eccentricity interfering wonderfully little with the sympathy of the audience for their troubles and their final triumph over them. "The Hunchback" is a very satisfactory play to see, but let nobody who has seen it well acted attempt to read it in cold blood!

It had an immense run, and afforded me an opportunity of testing the difference between an infinite repetition of the text of Shakespeare and that of any other writer. I played Juliet upward of a hundred nights without any change of part and did not weary of it; Julia, in "The Hunchback," after half the repetition became so tiresome to me that I would have given anything to have changed parts with my sprightly Helen, if only for a night, to refresh myself and recover a little from the extreme weariness I felt in constantly repeating Julia. The audience certainly would have suffered by the exchange, for Miss Taylor would not have played my part so much better than I, as I should have played hers worse than she did. Indeed, her performance of the character of Helen saved it from the reproach of coarseness, which very few actresses would have been able to avoid while giving it all the point and lively humor which she threw into it. I had great pleasure in acting the piece with her, she did her business so thoroughly well and was so amiable and agreeable a fellow-worker.

In my last letter to Miss S– I have spoken of a party at the Countess of Cork's, to which I went. She was one of the most curious figures in the London society of my girlish days. Very aged, yet retaining much of a vivacity of spirit and sprightly wit for which she had been famous as Mary Monckton, she continued till between ninety and a hundred years old to entertain her friends and the gay world, who frequently during the season assembled at her house.

I have still a note begging me to come to one of her evening parties, written under her dictation by a young person who used to live with her, and whom she called her "Memory;" the few concluding lines scrawled by herself are signed "M. Cork, æt. 92." She was rather apt to appeal to her friends to come to her on the score of her age; and I remember Rogers showing me an invitation he had received from her for one of the ancient concert evenings (these were musical entertainments of the highest order, which Mr. Rogers never failed to attend), couched in these terms: "Dear Rogers, leave the ancient music and come to ancient Cork, 93." Lady Cork's drawing-rooms were rather peculiar in their arrangement: they did not contain that very usual piece of furniture, a pianoforte, so that if ever she especially desired to have music she hired an instrument for the evening; the rest of the furniture consisted only of very large and handsome armchairs placed round the apartments against the walls, to which they were made fast by some mysterious process, so that it was quite impossible to form a small circle or coterie of one's own at one of her assemblies. I remember when first I made this discovery expressing my surprise to the beautiful Lady Harriet d'Orsay, who laughingly suggested that poor old Lady Cork's infirmity with regard to the property of others (a well-known incapacity for discriminating between meum and tuum) might probably be the cause of this peculiar precaution with regard to her own armchairs, which it would not, however, have been a very easy matter to have stolen even had they not been chained to the walls. In the course of the conversation which followed, Lady E–, apparently not at all familiar with Chesterfield's Letters, said that it was Lady Cork who had originated the idea that after all heaven would probably turn out very dull to her when she got there; sitting on damp clouds and singing "God save the King" being her idea of the principal amusements there. This rather dreary image of the joys of the blessed was combated, however, by Lady E–, who put forth her own theory on the subject as far more genial, saying, "Oh dear, no; she thought it would be all splendid fêtes and delightful dinner parties, and charming, clever people; just like the London season, only a great deal pleasanter because there would be no bores." With reference to Lady Cork's theory, Lady Harriet said, "I suppose it would be rather tiresome for her, poor thing! for you know she hates music, and there would be nothing to steal but one another's wings."

Lady Cork's great age did not appear to interfere with her enjoyment of society, in which she lived habitually. I remember a very comical conversation with her in which she was endeavoring to appoint some day for my dining with her, our various engagements appearing to clash. She took up the pocket-book where hers were inscribed, and began reading them out with the following running commentary: "Wednesday—no, Wednesday won't do; Lady Holland dines with me—naughty lady!—won't do, my dear. Thursday?" "Very sorry, Lady Cork, we are engaged." "Ah yes, so am I; let's see—Friday; no, Friday I have the Duchess of C–, another naughty lady; mustn't come then, my dear. Saturday?" "No, Lady Cork, I am very sorry—Saturday, we are engaged to Lady D–." "Oh dear, oh dear! improper lady, too! but a long time ago, everybody's forgotten all about it—very proper now! quite proper now!"

Lady Cork's memory seemed to me to stretch beyond the limits of what everybody had forgotten. She was quite a young woman at the time of the youth of George III., and spoke of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to whose wife she, then the Honorable Mary Monckton, was maid of honor. It is a most tantalizing circumstance to me now, to remember a fragment of a conversation between herself and my mother, on the occasion of the first visit I was ever taken to pay her. I was a very young girl; it was just after my return from school at Paris, and the topics discussed by my mother and her old lady friend interested me so little that I was looking out of the window, and wondering when we should go away, when my attention was arrested by these words spoken with much emphasis by Lady Cork: "Yes, my dear, I was alone in the room, and the picture turned in its frame, and Lord Bute came out from behind it;" here, perceiving my eyes riveted upon her, she lowered her voice, and I distinctly felt that I was expected to look out of the window again, without having any idea, however, that the question was probably one of the character of a "naughty lady" of higher rank than those so designated to me some years later by old Lady Cork, who, if I may judge by this fragment of gossip, might have cleared up some disputed points as to the relations between the Princess of Wales and the Prime Minister.

I do not know that Lady Cork's reputation for beauty ever equaled that she had for wit, but when I knew her, at upward of ninety, she was really a very comely old woman. Her complexion was still curiously fine and fair, and there was great vivacity in her eyes and countenance, as well as wonderful liveliness in her manner. Her figure was very slight and diminutive, and at the parties at her own house she always was dressed entirely in white—in some rich white silk, with a white bonnet covered with a rich blonde or lace vail on her head; she looked like a little old witch bride. I recollect a curious scene my mother described to me, which she witnessed one day when calling on Lady Cork, whom she had known for many years. She was shown into her dressing-room, where the old lady was just finishing her toilet. She was about to put on her gown, and remaining a moment without it showed my mother her arms and neck, which were even then still white and round and by no means unlovely, and said, pointing to her maid, "Isn't it a shame! she won't let me wear my gowns low or my sleeves short any more." To which the maid responded by throwing the gown over her mistress's shoulders, exclaiming at the same time, "Oh, fie, my lady! you ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk so at your age!"—a rebuke which the nonagenarian beauty accepted with becoming humility.

The unfortunate propensity of poor Lady Cork to appropriate all sorts of things belonging to other people, valueless quite as often as valuable, was matter of public notoriety, so that the fashionable London tradesmen, to whom her infirmity in this respect was well known, never allowed their goods to be taken to her carriage for inspection, but always exacted that she should come into their shops, where an individual was immediately appointed to follow her about and watch her during the whole time she was making her purchases.

Whenever she visited her friends in the country, her maid on her return home used to gather together whatever she did not recognize as belonging to her mistress, and her butler transmitted it back to the house where they had been staying. I heard once a most ludicrous story of her carrying off, faute de mieux, a hedgehog from a place where the creature was a pet of the porters, and was running tame about the hall as Lady Cork crossed it to get into her carriage. She made her poor "Memory" seize up the prickly beast, but after driving a few miles with this unpleasant spiked foot-warmer, she found means to dispose of it at a small town, where she stopped to change horses, to a baker, to whom she gave it in payment for a sponge cake, assuring him that a hedgehog would be invaluable in his establishment for the destruction of black beetles, with which she knew, from good authority, that the premises of bakers were always infested.

The following note was addressed to Lady Dacre on the subject of a pretty piece called "Isaure," which she had written and very kindly wished to have acted at Covent Garden for my benefit. It was, however, judged of too slight and delicate a texture for that large frame, and the purpose was relinquished. I rather think it was acted in private at Hatfield House, Lady Salisbury filling the part of the heroine, which I was to have taken had the piece been brought out at Covent Garden.

>My dear Lady Dacre,

Will you be kind enough to send "Isaure" to my father? We will take the greatest possible care of her, and return her to you in all safety. I am only sorry that he cannot have the pleasure of hearing you read it; for though it can take its own part very well, you know even Shakespeare is not the worse for the interpretation of a sweet voice, musical accent, and correct emphasis. With regard to the production of the piece on the stage, I do not like to venture an opinion, because my short experience has been long enough already to show me how easily I might be mistaken in such matters.

There is no rule by which the humors of an audience can be predicted. On a benefit night, indeed, I feel sure that the piece would succeed, and answer your kind intention of adding to the attractions of the bill, be they what they might; but our judges are not the same, you know, two consecutive evenings, and therefore it is impossible to foretell the sentence of a second representation, for no "benefit" but that of the public itself. Isaure is a refined patrician beauty, and I am sometimes inclined to think that the Memphian head alone is of fit proportions for uttering oracles in the huge space of our modern stage. My father, however, is, from long experience, the best guesser of these riddles, and he will tell you honestly his opinion as to your heroine's public capacity. I am sure he will find his own reward in making her acquaintance. I am, my dear Lady Dacre, faithfully yours,

    Fanny Kemble.
    Great Russell Street.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

Thank you for the book you were so good as to send me. I have read that which concerns the Cenci in it, and think Leigh Hunt's reflections on the story and tragedy very good. I am glad you were at the play last night, because I thought I acted well—at least, I tried to do so. I stayed the first act of the new after-piece, and was rather amused by it. I do not know how the ladies' "inexpressibles" might affect the fortunes of the second act, but I liked all their gay petticoats in the first, extremely. The weather is not very propitious for us; we start to-morrow at nine. I send you the only copy of Sophocles I can lay my hand on this morning. Yours ever truly,

    F. A. Kemble.

A little piece called "The Invincibles," in which a smart corps of young Amazons in uniform were officered by Madame Vestris in the prettiest regimentals ever well worn by woman, was the novelty I alluded to. The effect of the female troop was very pretty, and the piece was very successful.

I had only lately read Shelley's great tragedy, and Mrs. Jameson had been so good as to lend me various notices and criticisms upon it. The hideous subject itself is its weak point, and his selection of it one cause for doubting Shelley's power as a dramatic writer. Everything else in the terrible play suggests the probable loss his death may have been to the dramatic literature of England. At the same time, the tenor of all his poems denotes a mind too unfamiliar with human life and human nature in their ordinary normal aspects and conditions for a good writer of plays. His metaphysical was almost too much for his poetical imagination, and perhaps nothing between the morbid horror of that Cenci story and the ideal grandeur of the Greek Prometheus would have excited him to the dramatic handling of any subject.

His translation from Calderon's "El Magico Prodigioso," and his bit of the Brocken scene from "Faust," are fine samples of his power of dramatic style; he alone could worthily have translated the whole of "Faust;" but I suppose he really was too deficient in the vigorous flesh-and-blood vitality of the highest and healthiest poetical genius to have been a dramatist. He could not deal with common folk nor handle common things; humor, that great tragic element, was not in him; the heavens and all their clouds and colors were his, and he floated and hovered and soared in the ethereal element like one native to it. Upon the firm earth his foot wants firmness, and men and women as they are, are at once too coarse and complex, too robust and too infinitely various for his delicate, fine, but in some sense feeble handling.

Browning is the very reverse of Shelley in this respect; both have written one fine play and several fine dramatic compositions; but throughout Shelley's poetry the dramatic spirit is deficient, while in Browning's it reveals itself so powerfully that one wonders how he has escaped writing many good plays besides the "Blot on the Scutcheon" and that fine fragmentary succession of scenes, "Pippa Passes."

    Great Russell Street.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

I fear I am going to disappoint you, and 'tis with real regret that I do so, but I have been acting every night almost for the last month, and when to-day I mentioned my project of spending this my holiday evening with you, both my aunt and my father seemed to think that in discharging my debt to you I was defrauding nearer and older creditors; and suggested that my mother, who really sees but little of me now, might think my going out to-night unkind. I cannot, therefore, carry out my plan of visiting you, and beg that you will forgive my not keeping my promise this evening. I am moreover so far from well that my company would hardly give you much pleasure, nor could I stay long if I came, for early as it is my head is aching for its pillow already.

As soon as a week occurs in which I have two holidays I will try to give you one of them. I send you back Crabbe, which I have kept for ever; for a great poet, which he is, he is curiously unpoetical, I think. Yours ever truly,

    F. A. Kemble.
    Great Russell Street.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,