Mrs. Kemble's Memoirs

THE reminiscences which Mrs. Kemble has been giving to the world, under two or three different titles, form one of the largest contributions made during the last few years to biographic literature. One volume, of more than average bulk, was devoted simply to her girlhood ; another book,¹ of equal compass, has just been published, which continues the narrative through the next fourteen years, and closes abruptly, leaving its heroine still in the meridian of life. It will be remembered, moreover, that these publications were preceded, long ago, by that of three or four journals, gleaned from the same experience. With all these opportunities, it is time for us to consider, a little more fully than we could do while reading the first of her Old Woman’s Gossip, the value of what Mrs. Kemble has to tell about herself and her qualifications as an autobiographer.

Biographies, like people, fall naturally into groups or sets. As one volume of reminiscence after another comes from the press, we take those which treat of similar mental phases, or introduce the same events and people, and compare their testimony; turning from one to another to form our judgments, or taking sides according to our sympathies. We recall only one recent memoir which covers to a certain extent the same ground as Mrs. Kemble’s, and that is the Life of Macready. It is curious to compare the passages in which the two tragedians cross one another’s orbits, so to speak, for a moment. In Macready’s fragment of autobiography he has a passing allusion to the Kembles, and to the writer of these Records in particular, as being always theatrical in manner. Mrs. Kemble, on her part, tells at some length of her acting with Macready, on her return to the stage in 1848, and describes in a tone which is fairly indignant his rushing movement on the boards, and the brusqueness of his manner in the green-room. Her sketch of him, both as actor and acquaintance, is made with a harder pencil than she usually employs; she does not bestow on him the dignity which he wears in other records, but she does justice to the amiable character of his journal, a work which could hardly fail, we should think, to soften his harshest enemy. If Macready had lived to read Mrs. Kemble’s Records, he would have found in them a sincerity not very far from his own, albeit differently expressed; the simple humility of the one utterance being very unlike the spirited, gracious — shall we say theatrical ? — tone of the other. For Macready’s word is not contradicted by the testimony of these Records. Every page which Mrs. Kemble has written is vividly stamped with her personality. She is always a presence in her book, and we never forget that this presence is, so to speak, a royal one, — that of a person who belongs by birth and by talent to the once reigning family of the English stage.

This individual tone forms the keynote of the book, and helps us to a classification of its somewhat heterogeneous material. Rich as it is in anecdote, its place is not among the gossips, but in the higher department of personal biography ; it is more nearly related by its qualities to certain French memoirs than to any recent English autobiography.

Mrs. Kemble has not the points of a great observer. Her mind is of a romantic and imaginative rather than perceptive order. Her likes and dislikes get in the way of her vision, hindering her from seeing many minor characteristics in people, and causing her to magnify their outlines. Hence her portraits are idealized in the manner of old miniatures ; though full of distinction and charm, they bring out no new or striking features in the personality of her sitters. Nor has she, on the other hand, any inward experience large enough to be a guide to the experience of others. Religious feeling, of a sincere, spontaneous kind, she undoubtedly has, and her pages are full of interesting and often suggestive thought on religious subjects, from which the involuntary cant of her more youthful speculations has in great part disappeared. This book is not, however, sufficiently spiritual in tone to please the professed readers of religious biography, while it is too conventional for the esprits forts. In short, Mrs. Kemble’s religious faith, her intellectual powers, her vigorous common sense, and her positive idiosyncrasies are all integral parts of her personality, and could serve no “ purposes ” so well as they do the purpose of memoir writing. She has the art of gossiping about self without being egotistic or tiresome ; she is at once garrulous and dignified, reticent and frank, and can ignore her public — even hold it at arm’s length — while taking it freely into her confidence.

A critic, whose literary insight was spiritual perception, — Alexandre Vinet, — has said somewhere, “ On dit souvent que l’esprit est dupe du oœur ce qui n’empêche pas que le cœur même ne soit une lumière.” Many charming French memoirs testify to the value of heart as an element in biography, but we recall no English writer of this class of works who has relied upon it more frankly and gracefully than Mrs. Kemble.

Her letters to her friends show an unwearying affection, which does not falter even under the weight of life-long correspondence with one who continues to put to her such hackneyed and unresolvable questions as whether imagination makes a fair balance in heightening our pains and our pleasures. Readers who grew a little impatient of the endless reasonings of Miss Kemble and her friend H. S., in the former volume, will be alarmed at recognizing traces of the debating in this one. These relics of girlhood have their uses, however, in connecting the personality of the two books and marking the development into womanhood. Everybody knows the reply of Punch’s dowager to the young beauty who declares that no woman is worth looking at after thirty, “ Nor worth talking to before, my dear.” Fanny Kemble was well worth listening to in the correspondence of her girlhood, even ; but the record of her later years exceeds its predecessor in interest, as the conversation of a cultivated woman surpasses in finish that of a girl. The letters become more varied and impulsive in tone, more unconstrained in thought.

Mrs. Kemble’s experiences as a resident of the United States take up about one third of the book, and are as entertaining as might have been expected, from the known energy of her pen. That instrument is in its way almost as vigorous a protestant against the minor discomforts of life as Carlyle’s own. In the journey to Georgia, — the results of which have been recorded in her journal on a Southern plantation, and are therefore not detailed here, — we have a minute account of the annoyances occasioned by the scarcity, in some cases the absence, of clean towels. A community of interests, in this respect, with “ voters who use the wrong kind of soap,” as George Eliot puts it, was too much, in spite of abolitionism and liberalism. In fact, the problem of American equality at that day presented a good many hard knots, both speculative and practical, to the English mind, — questions which nowadays confront it nearer home. Mrs. Kemble seems to have faced them all with the same conscientious spirit in which she answered the questions of H. S.

“ Did I tell you,” she writes, “ that the other day our farmer’s wife sent me word that she had seen me walking in the garden in a gown that she had liked very much, and wished I would let her have the pattern of it ? This message surprised me a little, but, upon due reflection, I carried the gown down to her, with an agreeable sense of my own graceful condescension. My farmer’s wife gave me small thanks, and I am sure thought I had done just what I ought.”

A later observation on this subject is less experimental. It is called out by a short rustication at a Pennsylvania farmhouse, where the writer, her own servants, and the haymakers in their shirt-sleeves sat down at one table: —

“ It is nonsense talking about positive equality. These people are sorry associates for me, and so, I am sure, am I for them.”

Mrs. Kemble is not, as we have said, a particularly close observer, but she has a very charming gift of narration, and imparts to her account of her friends something of the warmth of her intercourse with them. On the other hand, she often depicts herself from the outside with considerable picturesqueness, as when she tells us of a hot night at Butler Place, during which, unable to sleep for the heat, she went out-of-doors, and walked up and down the avenue “ barefooted, et dans le simple appareil d’une beauté qu'on vient d’arracher au sommeil.”

Of the London gossip, of which we have a good deal and of a very pleasant kind, nothing is more prettily told than one or two little anecdotes of Thackeray, in which all his sensitiveness is finely preserved in the sympathetic tone of the writer. We have room only for the shorter of these anecdotes :

“ The last time I saw Thackeray was at a dinner at my dear friend Mr. Harness’. As we were about to seat ourselves at table, I being between Mr. Harness and Thackeray, his daughter Anne (now Mrs. Ritchie) was going to place herself on the other side of her father. ‘ No, no,’ said our dear host. ‘ That will not do. I cannot have the daughter next the father.’ And Miss Thackeray was invited to take another place. She had just published The History of Elizabeth [Mrs. Kemble is wrong in assuming our little friend Elizabeth to be a woman with a history] in which she showed herself to have inherited some of the finer elements of her father’s literary genius. As we sat down, I said to him, ‘ But it appears very evident, I think, that the daughter is to be next to the father.’ He looked at me for a moment with a beaming face, and then said, ‘ Do you know, I have never read a word of that thing.’ ‘ Oh,’ cried I, ‘ Thackeray ! Why don’t you ? It is excellent! It would give you so much pleasure ! ’ ‘I could n’t, I could n’t ! ’ said he, with the tears in his eyes. ‘ It would tear my guts out! ’ Which powerful English expression of emotion would have startled me less in French or Italian: Cela m'arracherait les entrailies, or mi soiscerebellero.’ ”

We cannot take our leave of Mrs. Kemble without a word as to the beauty of her style, partly the result, perhaps, of her early acquaintance with the best dramatic literature. It is a more negligent style than would at first appear from its stately movement, but is never really incorrect, though some of the sentences might be difficult to parse. Such a large, easy, vigorous style very few women have written. With more condensation, it might almost deserve the epithet of great.