fully fostered I can better judge from the sad vantageground of my own experience." Linked to this fiery, loving, suffering, acute-minded woman was an affectionate, dignified, heavy-moulded husband, with his share of the theatrical traits of his family, to whom she and their children were warmly attached, but who neither shared nor comprehended the finer senses or higher standard of his wife, and for that reason probably wounded all the more her sensibilities. 66 Fanny Kemble inherited her full share of her mother's susceptibilities, vehemence, and suffering nature: her pulse thrilled, her heart beat, her tears gushed forth upon every occasion, painful or pleasurable; her impetuosity burst the bounds of self-control, making her deaf to assurances or remonstrances; as she herself said, "My suddenness is the curse of my nature." Speaking of her home, she says: "The defect of our home education is that, from the mental tendencies of all of us, no less than from our whole mode of life, the more imaginative and refined intellectual qualities are fostered in us in preference to our reasoning power. We have all excitable natures; and whether in head or heart, that is a disadvantage. The unrestrained indulgence of feeling is as injurious to moral strength as the undue excess of fancy is to mental vigor." To brace herself against her temperament, Fanny Kemble cultivated unusually systematic pursuits and monotonous habits, from an instinct of self-preservation, persuaded, as she says, "that religion and reason alike justify such a strong instinctive action in natures which derive a constant mental support from the sooth ing and restraining influence of systematic habits of monotonous regularity." An observant friend of Mrs. Kemble said to me, as much as forty years ago: "If Fanny Kemble did not read her Bible at such an hour, visit at such an hour, exercise at such an hour, and gird herself with set habits, she would go mad." But this is not the whole explanation; for while she did undoubtedly thus seek support, she had inherited from her very English father a worship of law and order, of church and state, of ancient customs, which contrasted violently with her usual impulsiveness and assertion of individuality. The upholder of form and etiquette, the asserter of dignity to-day, would to-morrow defy conventionality, mortify friends, and scandalize strangers by walking in full dress into a river, up to her arms, and then go dripping home through a crowd of beholders. And this metamorphosis was as swift as the flow in a spirit thermometer, as sudden as the transformation scene in a pantomime, and as absolute; the passing was instantaneous and unconscious. During the life of Gouverneur Kemble, a delightful gentleman, crony of Washington Irving, remote kinsman of Fanny Kemble, to whom he played the host at his pleasant place on the Hudson River, opposite West Point, Saturday was called at the Military Academy "Kemble day," because the professors and officers went in turn to dine with their neighbor. When Fanny Kemble took on her magisterial style, it might well have been called "Kemble day," for it was an inheritance from her theatrical ancestors, and recalled anecdotes of John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. I was impelled one day to say to Mrs. Kemble that I had found out what was the matter with her: there were too many of her, she must have been intended for twins; and I cannot better define the superabundant, tumultuous, dual nature, partaking of the extreme antipodal characteristics of her parents. Her feelings rose and fell like the tide in the British Channel, and every few hours, when the tide was turning, she was in a state of agitation, tossed like a cockle boat on a cross sea. I doubt if any friend of Fanny Kemble thinks of her in a composed state, but rather as moved by joy or sorrow; and this agitation led her to shrink from general society as too exciting and too embarrassing to one so easily discomposed, and to long for a communion with nature and familiar friends, a feeling fully reciprocated by those friends who enjoyed her most under such conditions. One cannot read her books without laughing and grieving over the series of scrapes and collisions caused by her suddenness, rashness, and subsequent fears, her assertion of independence, her acute sympathies, her mission as a crusader. Some of Mrs. Kemble's collisions, which are reported with exaggeration, reduced to bare facts, can be referred to these peculiarities, some to her theatrical inheritance, some to her self-imposed duty as a crusader, some to a sudden freak, some to her embarrassment and consequent clutching at safety, or passing along the mortification at her own discomposure. She says somewhere, "I am always remarkably cross when I am frightened," a natural concatenation. From whatever cause she occasionally wounded the feelings of others, her repentance was swift and sincere; her sense of justice, her warmth of heart, brought remorse and repentance. Such as she was, brimming over with reverence and gratitude to God, with love to man, with sensibility to all the problems of life, to nature, with interest in art, in literature, in politics; generous, magnanimous, truthful, full of hope; crowned and worshipped, then struck down, doomed to bear thenceforth her heavy cross alone, -she has been to her family a guardian angel, to her friends a mighty fortress and shelter, to the world a delight and refreshment. Mrs. Kemble's wish to die at home was fulfilled. Old age crept upon her in her own country, in the home of her younger daughter, wife of an English clergyman, and there she passed instantaneously from life to death. Green ivy risen from out the cheerful earth Will fringe the lettered stone, and herbs spring forth, Commemorating genius, talent, skill, That could not lie concealed where thou wast known; The God upon whose mercy they are thrown. |