Records of Later Life Part 9

I presume that the long chapter you have written me upon the inevitability of people's folly and the expediency of believing, first, that G.o.d makes us fools, and then that he punishes us for behaving like fools, is a result of your impeded circulation, under the effect of the east wind upon your cuticle. How I wish, without the bitter month's sea-sickness, you could be here beside me now, this 24th of March, between an open window and door, and with my fire dying out; to be sure, as I have just been taking two monstrous unruly dogs to a pond at some distance from the house, for a swim, and as S---- was with me and I had to carry her (now a pretty heavy lump) through several mud pa.s.sages, the agreeable glow in which I feel myself may not be altogether due to the warmth of the atmosphere, although it is really as hot as our last of May. How I wish you could spend the summer with me! How you would rejoice in the heat, to me so hateful and intolerable! To persons of your temperament, I suppose h.e.l.l, instead of the popular idea of fire and brimstone, presents some such frigid horror as poor Claudio's: "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice."

I was walking once with Trelawney, who is as chilly as an Italian greyhound, at Niagara, by a wall of rock, upon which the intense sun beat, and was reflected upon us till I felt as if I was being roasted alive, and exclaimed, "Oh, this is h.e.l.l itself!" to which he replied with a grunt of dissatisfaction, "Oh, dear, I hope h.e.l.l will be a great deal _warmer_ than this!"

In my observation about the development of our filial affections after we become parents ourselves, I may have fallen into my usual error of generalizing from too narrow a basis, and taken it for granted that my own experience is necessarily that of others.... But after all, though _everybody_ is not like me, _somebody_ must be, and one's self is therefore a safe source from whence to draw conclusions with regard to others, up to a certain point. Made of the same element, however diversely fashioned and tempered by various influences, we still are all alike in the main ingredients of our humanity; and it must be quite as contrary to sound sense to imagine the processes of one's own mind singular, as to suppose them universal.

Profound truism! but truisms are profound--they lie at the foundations of existence--for they are truths.

My journal is fast disappearing behind the fire. How I wish I had spent the time I wasted in writing it, in making extracts from the books I read!...

I wrote my sister a long answer, by Mrs. Jameson, to her last letter, in which I entered at some length upon the various objections to a public life; not that I was then aware of the decision she has now adopted of going upon the stage--a decision, however, for which I have been entirely prepared ever since my visit to England and my return home....

I hope she may succeed to the fullest extent of her desires, for I do not think that hers is a nature that would be benefited by the bitter medicine of disappointment. Oh, how I wish she could once enter some charmed sphere of peace and happiness! The discipline of happiness, in which I have infinite faith, would I think be of infinite use to her, but--G.o.d knows best.... I am anxious, too, that her experiment of a life of excitement should be the most favorable possible, that, under its happiest aspect, she may learn how remote it is from happiness.... Had she remained in England, I should have rejoiced to think that Mrs.

Somerville was her friend: such a friend would be G.o.d's minister to the heart and mind of any young woman. It is not a small source of regret to me, to think of how much inestimable human intercourse my residence in America deprives me.

I think my father's selecting Paris for the first trial of my sister's abilities a mistake; and I am very, _very_ anxious about the result.

Natural talent is sufficient for a certain degree of success in acting, but not in singing, where the expression of feeling, the dramatic portion of the performance, is so severely trammeled by mechanical difficulties: the execution of which is all but rendered impossible by the slightest trepidation, the tone of the voice itself being often fatally affected by the loss of self-possession.

Pasta and Malibran both failed _at first_ in Paris, and I confess I shall be most painfully anxious till I hear the issue of this experiment....

I am in the garden from morning till night, but am too impatient for mortal roots and branches. I should have loved the sort of planting described in Tieck's "Elves," where they stamp a pine-cone into the earth, and presently a fir-tree springs up, and, rising towards the sky with the happy children who plant it, rocks them on its topmost branches, to and fro in the red sunset.

Good-bye, G.o.d bless you.

I am ever your affectionate, F. A. B.

[Many years after these letters were written, in 1845, when I joined my sister in Rome, I found her living in the most cordial intimacy with the admirable woman whose acquaintance I had coveted for her and for myself.

My year's residence in Rome gave me frequent opportunities of familiar intercourse with Mrs. Somerville, whose European celebrity, the result of her successful devotion to the highest scientific studies, enhanced the charm of her domestic virtues, her tender womanly character, and perfect modesty and simplicity of manner.

During my last visit to Rome, in 1873, speaking to the old blind Duke of Sermoneta, of my desire to go to Naples to pay my respects to Mrs. Somerville, who was then residing there, at an extremely advanced age, he said, "Elle est si bonne, si savante, et si charmante, que la mort n'ose point la toucher." I was unable to carry out my plan of going to Naples, and Mrs. Somerville did not long survive the period at which I had hoped to have visited her.

Early in our acquaintance I had expressed some curiosity, not unmixed with dread, upon the subject of scorpions, never having seen one. Mrs. Somerville laughed, and said that a sojourn in Italy was sure to introduce them sooner or later to me. The next time that I spent the evening with her after this conversation, as I stood by the chimney talking to her, I suddenly perceived a most detestable-looking black creature on the mantelpiece. I started back in horror to my hostess's great delight, as she had been at the pains of cutting out in black paper an imitation scorpion, for my edification, and was highly satisfied with the impression it produced upon me.

Urania's reptile, however, was the conventional mythical scorpion of the Zodiac, and only vaguely represented the evil-looking, venomous beast with which I subsequently became, according to her prophecy, acquainted, in all its natural living repulsiveness.

Besides this sample scorpion, which I have carefully preserved, I have two drawings which Mrs. Somerville made for me; one, a delicate outline sketch of what is called Oth.e.l.lo's House in Venice, and the other, a beautifully executed colored copy of his shield, surmounted by the Doge's cap, and bearing three mulberries for a device,--proving the truth of the a.s.sertion, that the _Otelli del Moro_ were a n.o.ble Venetian folk, who came originally from the Morea, whose device was the mulberry, the growth of that country, and showing how curious a jumble Shakespeare has made, both of name and device, in calling him a _Moor_ and embroidering his arms on his handkerchief as _strawberries_. In Cinthio's novel, from which Shakespeare probably took his story, the husband is a Moor, and I think called by no other name.]

PHILADELPHIA, May 7th, 1838.

DEAREST HARRIET,

I fear this will scarce reach you before you leave England upon your German pilgrimage, but I presume it will follow you, and be welcome wherever it finds you.

Do you hear that the steamships have accomplished their crossing from England to America in perfect safety, the one in seventeen, the other in fifteen days! just half the usual time, thirty days being the average of the finest pa.s.sages this way. Oh, if you knew what joy this intelligence gave me! It seemed at once to bring me again within reach of England and all those whom I love there.

And even though I should not therefore return thither the oftener, the speed and certainty with which letters will now pa.s.s between these two worlds, hitherto so far apart, is a thing to rejoice at exceedingly.

Besides all personal considerations in the matter, the wonder and delight of seeing this great enterprise of man's ingenuity and courage thus successful is immense. One of the vessels took her departure for England the other day, filled with pa.s.sengers, and sent from the wharf with a thousand acclamations and benedictions. The mere report of it overcame me with emotion; thus to see s.p.a.ce annihilated, and the furthest corners of the earth drawn together, fills one with admiration for this amazing human nature, more potent than the whole material creation by which it is surrounded, even than the three thousand miles of that Atlantic abyss. These manifestations of the power of man's intellect seem to me to cry aloud to him to "stand in awe [of his own nature] and sin not." And yet these victories over matter are nothing compared to the achievements of human souls, with their powers of faith, of love, and of endurance. I will not, however, inflict further exclamations upon you....

Certainly mere details of personal being, doing, and suffering are of some value when one would almost give one's eyes for a moment's sight of the bodily presence of the soul one loves: so you shall have my present history; which is, that at this immediate writing, I am sitting in a species of verandah (or piazza, as they call it here), which runs along the front of the house. It has a low bal.u.s.trade and columns of white-painted wood, supporting a similar verandah on the second or bedroom story of the house; the sitting-rooms are all on the ground floor. It is Sunday morning, but I am obliged to be content with such devotions and admonitions as I can enjoy here, from within and around me, as my plight does not admit of my leaving home....

I am sorry to say that the fact of letters miscarrying between this country and England has been very disagreeably proved to me this morning by the receipt of one from dear William Harness, who mentions having written another to me five months ago, which other has never yet made its appearance, and I presume would hardly think it worth while to do so now.

We have had an uncommonly mild winter, without, I think, more than a fortnight of severe weather, and in March the sun was positively summer hot. I am out of doors almost all day. Our spring, however, has made up for the lenient winter, by being as cold and capricious as possible, and at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud; and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do not remember so backward a spring since I have been in this country. I do not complain of it, however, though everybody else does; for the longer the annihilating heat of the summer keeps off, the better the weather suits me. Will you not come over and spend the summer with me, now that the sea voyage is only half as long as it was? Come, and we will go to Niagara together, and you shall be half roasted alive for full five months, an effectual warming through, I should think, for the rest of the year. Dear Harriet, Niagara is the one thing of its kind for which no fellow has yet been found in the world, and to see it is certainly worth a fortnight's sea-sickness. I cannot say more in its praise.

You speak of the sufferings of your wretched Irish population; and because patience, fort.i.tude, benevolence, charity, and many good fruits spring from that bitter root, you seem to be reconciled to the fact that ignorance and imprudence are the real causes from which the greater part of this frightful misery proceeds.

Though G.o.d's infinite mercy has permitted that even our very errors and sins may become, if we please, sources of virtue in, and therefore of good to, us, do you not think that our nature, such as He has seen fit to form it, with imperfection in its very essence, and such a transition as death in its experience, furnishes us with a sufficient task in the mere ceaseless government and education which it requires, without our superadding to this difficult charge the culpability of infinite neglect, the absolute damage and injury and all the voluntary deterioration, sin, and sorrow which we inflict upon ourselves?

Why are we to charge G.o.d with all these things, or conceive it possible that He ordained a state of existence in which mercy's supplication would be that sudden death might sweep a hundred sufferings of worse kind from the face of the earth?

G.o.d is unwearied in producing good; and we can so little frustrate His determinate and omnipotent goodness, that out of our most desperate follies and wickednesses the ultimate result is sure to be preponderating good; but does this excuse the sinners and fools who vainly attempt to thwart His purpose? or will they be permitted to say that they are "tempted of G.o.d"? Indeed, dear Harriet, I must abide in the conviction that we manufacture misery for ourselves which was never appointed for us; and because Mercy, unfailing and unbounded, out of these very miseries of our own making, draws blessed balsam for our use, I cannot believe that it ordained and inflicted all our sufferings.

I began this letter yesterday, and am again sitting under my piazza, with S----, in a buff coat, zigzagging like a yellow b.u.t.terfly about the lawn, and Margery mounting guard over her, with such success as you may fancy a person taking care of a straw in a high wind likely to have....

I have just been enjoying the pleasure of a visit from one of the members of the Sedgwick family. They are all my friends, and I do think all and each in their peculiar way good and admirable. Catharine Sedgwick has been prevented from coming to me by the illness of the brother in whose family she generally spends the winter in New York....

Like most business men here, he has lived in the deplorable neglect of every physical law of health, taking no exercise, immuring himself for the greater part of the day in rooms or law courts where the atmosphere was absolute poison; and using his brains with intense application, without ever allowing himself proper or sufficient relaxation. Now, will you tell me that Providence _intended_ that this man should so labor and so suffer? Why, the very awfulness of the consequence forbids such a supposition for a moment. Or will you, perhaps, say that this dire calamity was sent upon him in order to try the fort.i.tude, patience, and resignation of his wife, within a month of her confinement; or of his sister, whose nervous sensibility of temperament was of an order to have been driven insane, had they not been mercifully relieved from the worst results of the fatal imprudence of poor R----?

Whenever I see that human beings do act up as fully as they can to _all_ the laws of their Maker, I shall be prepared to admire misery, agony, sickness, and all tortures of mind or body as excellent devices of the Deity, expressly appointed for our benefit; but while I see obvious and abundant natural causes for them in our _disobedience_ to His laws, I shall scarce come to that conclusion, in spite of all the good which He makes for us out of our evil. I know we must sin, but we sin more than we _must_; and I know we must suffer, but we suffer more than we _must_ too....

G.o.d bless you, dear.

Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B.

PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, May 27th.

MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I have received within the last few days your second letter from London; the date, however, is rather a puzzle, it being _August the 10th_, instead (I presume) of April. I hasten, while I am yet able, to send you word of R. S----'s rapid and almost complete recovery....

In spite of the admirable forethought which prompted the beginning of this letter, my dear Mrs. Jameson, it is now exactly a fortnight since I wrote the above lines; and here I am at my writing-table, in my drawing-room, having in the interim _perpetrated_ another girl baby....

My new child was born on the same day of the month that her sister was, and within an hour of the same time, which I think shows an orderly, systematic, and methodical mode of proceeding in such matters, which is creditable to me.... I should have been unhappy at the delay of my intelligence about R. S----, but that I feel sure Catharine must ere this have written to you herself. I am urging her might and main to come to us and recruit a little, but, like all other very good people, she thinks she can do something better than take care of herself; a lamentable fallacy, for which good people in particular, and the world in general, suffer.

As you may suppose, I do not yet indulge in the inditing of very long epistles, and shall therefore make no apology for this, which is almost brief enough to be witty. I am glad you like Sully, because I love him.

I am ever yours very truly, F. A. B.

BUTLER PLACE, 1838.

MY DEAREST HARRIET,

This purposes to be an answer to a letter of yours dated the 10th of May; the last I have received from you.... I cannot for the life of me imagine why we envelope death in such hideous and mysterious dreadfulness, when, for aught we can tell, being born is to an infant quite as horrible and mysterious a process, perhaps (for we know nothing about it) of a not much different order. The main difference lies in the fact of our antic.i.p.ation of the one event--_ma, chi sa?_--but although some fear of death is wholesomely implanted in us, to make us shun danger and to prevent the numbers who, without it, would impatiently rush away from the evils of their present existence through that gate, yet certainly one-half of the King of Terror's paraphernalia we invest him with ourselves; since, really, being born is quite as wonderful, and, when we consider the involuntary obligations of existence thus thrust upon us, quite as awful a thing as dying can possibly be.

You retort upon me for having fallen from the observance of anniversaries, that I am still a devout worshiper of places, and in this sense, perhaps, an idolater.... My love for certain places is inexplicable to myself. They have, for some reasons which I have not detected, so powerfully affected my imagination, that it will thenceforth never let them go. I retain the strongest impression of some places where I have stayed the shortest time; thus there is a certain spot in the hill country of Ma.s.sachusetts, called Lebanon, where I once spent two days....

I was going to tell you how like Paradise that place was to my memory, and with what curious yearning I have longed to visit it again, but I was interrupted; and in the intervening hours S---- has sickened of the measles, and I am now sitting writing by her bedside, not a little disturbed by my own cogitations, and her mult.i.tudinous questions, the continuous stream of which is nothing slackened by an atmosphere of 91 in the shade, and the furious fever of her own attack....

As soon as S---- is sufficiently recovered, we purpose going to the seaside to escape from the horrible heat. Our destination is a certain beach on the sh.o.r.e of Long Island, called Rockaway, where there is fine bathing, and a good six miles of hard sand for riding and driving. After that, I believe we shall go to the hill country of Berkshire, to visit our friends the Sedgwicks. I wonder whether your love for heat would have made agreeable to you a six-mile ride I took to-day, at about eleven o'clock, the thermometer standing at 94 in the shade. If this is not more _warmth_ than even you can away with, you must be "bold and determined like any salamander, ma'am." ... My love for flowers is the same as ever. Last winter in London I almost ruined myself in my nosegays, and came near losing my character by them, as n.o.body would believe I was so gallant to myself _out of my own pocket_. My room is always full of them here, and in spite of recollecting (which I always do in the very act of sticking flowers in my hair) that I am upon the verge of _thirty_, they are still my favorite ornaments.

Thank you for your constant affection, my dear friend. It makes my heart sink to think how much is lost to me in the distance that divides us. If death severs forever the ties of this world, and our intercourse with one another here is but a temporary agency, ceasing with our pa.s.sage into another stage of existence, how strong a hold have you and I laid upon each other's souls, to be sundered at the brief limit of this mortal life! It may possibly have accomplished its full purpose, this dear friendship of ours, even here; but it is almost impossible to think that its uses may not survive, or its duration extend beyond this life;--that is an awful thought overshadowing all our earthly loves, yet throwing us more completely upon Him, the Father, the Guardian of all; for on him alone can we surely rest always and forever. But how much must death change us if we can forget those who have been as dear to us here as you and I have been to each other!

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I thought we should have other senses hereafter, and if I could imagine any but those we now possess: I cannot, can you? To be sure I can imagine the possession of _common sense_, which would be a new one to me; but it is very funny, and impossible, to try to fancy a power, like seeing or hearing, of a different kind, though one can think of these with a higher degree of intensity, and wider scope.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet. G.o.d bless you.