The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay
Chapter 260 : more than darkness visible. To all the vast ma.s.s left to my direction by my dear fat

more than darkness visible. To all the vast ma.s.s left to my direction by my dear father, who burnt nothing, not even an invitation to dinner, are added not merely those that devolved to me by fatal necessity in 1818, but also all the papers possessed from her childhood to her decease of that sister you so well, dear madam, know to have been my heart's earliest darling. When on this pile are heaped the countless h.o.a.rds which my own now long life has gathered together, of my personal property, such as it is, and the correspondence of my family and my friends, and innumerable incidental windfalls, the whole forms a body that might make a bonfire to illuminate me nearly from hence to Penzance. And such a bonfire might perhaps be not only the shortest, but the wisest way to dispose of such materials. This enormous acc.u.mulation has been chiefly owing to a long unsettled home, joined to a mind too deeply occupied by immediate affairs and feelings to have the intellect at liberty for retrospective investigations. . . .

A LAST GOSSIPING LETTER.

(From Mrs. Piozzi to Madame d'Arblay.) Sion Row, Clifton, near Bristol, March 15, 1821.

I feel quite happy in being able to reply to dear Madame d'Arblay's good-natured inquiries, from this, the living world.

Such we cannot term Penzance--not with propriety--much like Omai, who said to you, "No mutton there, missee, no fine coach, no clock upon the stairs," etc.; but en revanche here is no Land's End, no submarine mine of Botallock! What a wonderful thing is that extensive cavern ! stretching out half a mile forward under the roaring ocean, from whence 'tis protected only by a slight covering, a crust of rock, which, if by any accident exploded,

"Would let in light on Pluto's dire abodes, Abhorr'd by men, and dreadful ev'n to G.o.ds."

Plutus, however, not Pluto, is professed proprietor - 'tis an immense vacuity filled with the vapours of tin and copper, belonging to Lord Falmouth and a company of miners, where sixty human beings work night and day, and hear the waves over their heads , sometimes regularly beating the Cornish cliffs, sometimes tossing the terrified mariner upon the inhospitable sh.o.r.e; where s.h.i.+pwreck is, even in these civilized days, considered as a G.o.dsend.

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I am glad I saw it, and that I shall see it no more. You would not know poor Streatham Park. I have been forced to dismantle and forsake it; the expenses of the present time treble those of the moments you remember; and since giving up my Welsh estate, my income is greatly diminished. I fancy this will be my last residence in this world, meaning Clifton, not Sion Row, where I only live till my house in the Crescent is ready for me. A high situation is become necessary to my breath, and this air will agree with me better than Bath did.

You ask how the Pitches family went on. Jane married a rough man, quarter-master to a marching regiment, and brought him three sons: the first a prodigy of science, wit, and manners; he died early: the second I know nothing of: the third, a model of grace and beauty, married the Duke of Marlborough's sister. Peggy is Countess Coventry, you know, and has a numerous progeny. Emily is wife to Mr. Jolliffe, M.P. for some place, I forget what.

Penelope married Sir John Sheffield, but died before he came to the t.i.tle. I dined with them all last time I was in London, at Coventry House. Poor old Davies's departure grieved me, so did that of good Mr. Embry; au reste, the village of Streatham is full of rich inhabitants, the common much the worse for being so spotted about with houses, and the possibility of avoiding constant intercourse with their inhabitants (as in Mr. Thrale's time) wholly lost!.....

DEATH OF MRS. PIOZZI.

May, 1821.--I have lost now, just lost, my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi,(339) who preserved her fine faculties, her imagination, her intelligence, her powers of allusion and citation, her extraordinary memory, and her almost unexampled vivacity, to the last of her existence.

She was in her eighty-second year, and yet owed not her death to age nor to natural decay, but to the effects of a fall in a journey from Penzance to Clifton. On her eightieth birthday she gave a great ball, concert, and supper, in the public rooms at Bath, to upwards of two hundred persons, and the ball she opened herself. She was, in truth, a most wonderful character for talents and eccentricity, for wit, genius, generosity, spirit, and powers of entertainment.

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MRS. PIOZZI COMPARED WITH MADAME DE STAEL.

She had a great deal both of good and not good, in common with Madame de Stael Holstein. They had the same sort of highly superior intellect, the same depth of learning, the same general acquaintance with science, the same ardent love of literature, the same thirst for universal knowledge, and the same buoyant animal spirits, such as neither sickness, sorrow, nor even terror, could subdue. Their conversation was equally luminous, from the sources of their own fertile minds, and from their splendid acquisitions from the works and acquirements of others.

Both were zealous to serve, liberal to bestow, and graceful to oblige; and both were truly highminded in prizing and praising whatever was admirable that came in their way.

Neither of them was delicate nor polished, though each was flattering and caressing; but both had a fund inexhaustible of good humour, and of sportive gaiety, that made their intercourse with those they wished to please attractive, instructive, and delightful and though not either of them had the smallest real malevolence in their compositions, neither of them could ever withstand the pleasure of uttering a repartee, let it wound whom it might, even though each would serve the very person they goaded with all the means in their power. Both were kind, charitable, and munificent, and therefore beloved; both were sarcastic, careless, and daring, and therefore feared. The morality of Madame de Stael was by far the most faulty, but so was the society to which she belonged so were the general manners of those by whom she was encircled.

SISTER HETTY.

(Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) October 21, 1821.

"Your mind," my dearest Esther, was always equal to literary pursuits, though your time seems only now to let you enjoy them.

I have often thought that had our excellent and extraordinary own mother been allowed longer life, she would have contrived to make you sensible of this sooner. I do not mean in a common way, for that has never failed, but in one striking and distinguished ; for she very early indeed began to form your taste for reading, and delighted

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to find time, amidst all her cares, to guide you to the best authors, and to read them with you, commenting and pointing out pa.s.sages worthy to be learned by heart.

I perfectly recollect, child as I was, and never of the party, this part of your education. At that very juvenile period, the difference even of months makes a marked distinction in bestowing and receiving instruction. I, also, was so peculiarly backward, that even our Susan stood before me; she could read when I knew not my letters. But though so sluggish to learn, I was always observant: do you remember Mr. Seaton's denominating me, at fifteen, "the silent, observant Miss f.a.n.n.y"? Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope's works and Pitt's "AEneid." I recollect, also, your spouting pa.s.sages from Pope, that I learned from hearing you recite them before--many years before I read them myself. But after you lost, so young, that incomparable guide, you had none left. Our dear -father was always abroad, usefully or ornamentally; and, after giving you a year in Paris with the best masters that could be procured, you came home at fifteen or sixteen to be exclusively occupied by musical studies, save for the interludes that were

"Sacred to dress and beauty's pleasing cares:"

for so well you played, and so lovely you looked, that admiration followed alike your fingers and your smiles : and the pianoforte and the world divided your first youth, which, had that exemplary guide been spared us, I am fully persuaded would have left some further testimony of its pa.s.sage than barely my old journals, written to myself, which celebrate your wit and talents as highly as your beauty. And I judge I was not mistaken, by all in which you have had opportunity to show your mental faculties, i.e. your letters, which have always been strikingly good and agreeable, and evidently unstudied.

When Alex comes home I will try to get "Crabbe," and try to hear it with pleasure. The two lines you have quoted are very touching.

Thus much, my dear Etty, i wrote on the day I received your last; but . . . .

November.-I write now from Eliot Vale, under the kind and elegant roof of sweet Mrs. Locke, who charges me with her most affectionate remembrances. Perhaps I may meet here with your favourite Crabbe: as I subscribe to no library, I know not how else I shall get at him. I thank you a Page 451

thousand times for the good bulletin of your health, my dearest Esther; and I know how kindly you will reciprocate my satisfaction when I tell you mine is inconceivably ameliorated, moyennant great and watchful care: and Alex keeps me to that with the high hand of peremptory insistence, according to the taste of the times for the "rising generation" expects just as much obedience to orders as they withhold. If you were to hear the young gentleman delivering to me his lectures on health, and dilating upon air, exercise, social intercourse, and gay spirits, you would be forced to seek a magnifying gla.s.s to believe that your eyes did not deceive you, but that it was really your nephew haranguing his mother. However, we must pa.s.s by the exhorting impetuosity, in favour of the zealous anxiety that fires it up in his animated breast.

OFFICIAL DUTIES TEMPORARILY RESUMED.

I was kept in town by a particular circ.u.mstance--I might say, like the play-bills, by particular desire; for it was a fair royal personage who condescended to ask me to remit my visit to Eliot Vale, that I might attend her sittings for her picture, her two ladies being at that time absent on cong?. You may believe how much I was gratified, because you know my sincere and truly warm attachment for all those gracious personages; but you may be surprised Your poor sister could now be pitched upon, where so much choice must always be at hand, for whiling away the tediousness of what she, the princess, calls the odious occupation of sitting still for this exhibition - but the fact is, I was able to fulfil her views better than most people could, in defiance of my altered spirits and depressed faculties, by having recourse simply to my memory in relating things I saw, or heard, or did, during the long ten years, and the eventful--added one year more, that I spent abroad. Only to name Bonaparte in any positive trait that I had witnessed or known, was sufficient to make her open her fine eyes in a manner extremely advantageous to the painter.

THE Rev. A. D'ARBLAY NAMED LENT PREACHER.

(Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) February 29, 1823.

.....Thanks for that kind jump of joy for the success of Alex at Lee, and for my hopes from St. Paul's. You ask who Page 452

named him preacher for the 5th Sunday in Lent: How could I omit telling you 'twas the Bishop of London himself? -This has been brought about by a detail too long for paper, but it is chiefly to my faithful old friends Bishop Fisher of Salisbury and the Archdeacon of Middles.e.x that we owe this mark of attention; for Alex has never been presented to the Bishop of London.

MADAME D'ARBLAY'S HEALTH AND OCCUPATION.

You still ask about my health, etc. I thought the good result would have sufficed ; but thus stands the detail : I was packing up a board of papers to carry with me to Richmond, many months now ago, and employed above an hour, bending my head over the trunk, and on my knees -when, upon meaning to rise, I was seized with a giddiness, a glare of sparks before my eyes, and a torturing pain on one side of my head, that nearly disabled me from quitting my posture, and that was followed, when at last I rose, by an inability to stand or walk.

My second threat of seizure was at Eliot Vale, while Alex was at Tunbridge. I have been suddenly taken a third time, in the middle of the night, with a seizure as if a hundred windmills were turning round in my head: in short,-I had now recourse to serious medical help, and, to come to the sum total, I am now so much better that I believe myself to be merely in the common road of such gentle, gradual decay as, I humbly trust, I have been prepared to meet with highest hope, though with deepest awe--for now many years back.

The chief changes, or reforms, from which I reap benefit are, 1st. Totally renouncing for the evenings all revision or indulgence in poring over those letters and papers whose contents come nearest to my heart, and work upon its bleeding regrets.

Next, transferring-to the evening, as far as is in my power, all of sociality, with Alex, or my few remaining friends, or the few he will present to me of new ones. 3rd. Constantly going out every day-either in brisk walks in the morning, or in brisk jumbles in the carriage of one of my three friends who send for me, to a t?te-?-t?te tea converse. 4th. Strict attention to diet.

I ought to have told you the medical sentence upon which I act.

These were the words--"You have a head over-worked, and a heart over-loaded." This produces a disposition to Page 453

fulness in both that causes stagnation, etc., with a consequent want of circulation at the extremities, that keeps them cold and aching. Knowing this, I now act upon it as warily as I am able.

The worst of all is, that I have lost, totally lost, my pleasure in reading! except when Alex is my lecturer, for whose sake my faculties are still alive to what--erst! gave them their greatest delight. But alone; I have no longer that resource; I have scarcely looked over a single sentence, but some word of it brings to my mind some mournful recollection, or acute regret, and takes from one all attention--my eyes thence glance vainly over pages that awaken no ideas.--This is melancholy in the extreme; yet I have tried every species of writing and writer-- but all pa.s.s by me mechanically, instead Of instructing or entertaining me intellectually. But for this sad deprivation of my original taste, my evenings might always be pleasing and reviving--but alas!

DESTROYED CORRESPONDENCE.

(Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) August, 1823.

What an interesting letter is this last, my truly dear Hetty 'tis a real sister's letter, and such a one as I am at this time frequently looking over of old times! For the rest of my life I shall take charge' and save my own executor the discretionary labours that with myself are almost endless ; for I now regularly destroy all letters that either may eventually do mischief, however clever, or that contain nothing of instruction or entertainment, however innocent. This, which I announce to all my correspondents who write confidentially, occasions my receiving letters that are real conversations. Were I younger I should consent to this condition with great reluctance-or perhaps resist it : but such innumerable papers, letters, doc.u.ments, and memorandums have now pa.s.sed through my hands, and, for reasons prudent, or kind, or conscientious, have been committed to the flames, that I should hold it wrong to make over to any other judgment than My Own, the danger or the innoxiousness of any and every ma.n.u.script that has been cast into my power. To you, therefore, I may now safely copy a charge delivered to me by UP our dear vehement Mr. Crisp, at the opening of my juvenile Page 454

correspondence with him,--"Harkee, you little monkey!--dash away whatever comes uppermost; if you stop to consider either what you say, or what may be said of you, I would not ,give one fig for your letters."--How little, in those days, did either he or I fear, or even dream of the press! What became of letters, jadis, I know not; but they were certainly both written and received with as little fear as wit. Now every body seems -obliged to take as much care of their writing desks as of their trinkets or purses,-for thieves be abroad of more descriptions than belong to the penniless pilferers.

THE PRINCESS AND THE REV. A. D'ARBLAY.