I went straight to the Lake of Como and over the Splügen spent only a lovely evening (with the next morning) at Cadenabbia. I mounted the Splügen under a splendid sky, and I shall never forget the sensation of rising, as night came (I walked incessantly, after we began to ascend) into that cool pure Alpine air, out of the stifling calidarium of Italy. I shall always remember a certain glass of fresh milk which I drank that evening, in the gloaming, far up, (a woman at a wayside hostel had it fetched from the cow) as the most heavenly draft that ever passed my lips. I went straight to Lucerne, to see Mrs. Kemble, who had already gone to Engelberg. I spent a day on the lake, making the giro; it was a splendid day, & Switzerland looked more sympathetic than I had ventured to hope. I went up to Engelberg, & spent nearly a week with Mrs. Kemble & Miss Butler, in that grim, ragged, rather vacuous, but by no means absolutely unbeautiful valley. I spent an enchanting day with Miss Butler—climbing up to the Trubsee, toward the Joch pass. The Trubsee is a little steel-grey tarn, in a high cool valley, at the foot of the Tiltis, whose great silver-gleaming snows overhang it and light it up. The whole place was a wilderness of the alpine rose—& the alpine stillness, the splendour of the weather, the beauty of the place, made the whole impression immense. We had a man with us who carried a lunch; & we partook of it at the little cold inn. The whole thing brought back my old Swiss days; I hadn’t believed they could revive even to that point. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
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New York, 115 East 25th St. Dec. 20th 1881. I had to break off the other day in Boston—the interruptions in the morning here are intolerable. That period of the day has none of the social sanctity here that it [has] in England, & which keeps it singularly free from intrusion. People—by which I mean ladies—think nothing of asking you to come & see them before lunch. Of course one can decline, but when many propositions of that sort come, a certain number stick. Besides, I have had all sorts of things to do, chiefly not profitable to recall. I have been three weeks in New York, and all my time has slipped away in mere movement. I try as usual to console myself with the reflection that I am getting impressions. This is very true; I have got a great many. I did well to come over; it was well worth doing. I indulged in some reflections a few pages back which were partly the result of a melancholy mood. I can do something here—it is not a mere complication. But it is not of that I must speak first in taking up my pen again—I shall return to those things later. I should like to finish briefly the little retrospect of the past year’s doings, which I left ragged on the opposite page. x x x
x x x x x x x x I came back from Switzerland to meet Alice, who had been a month in England, & whom I presently saw at the Star & Garter, at Richmond. I spent two or three days with her, and saw her afterwards at Kew, then I went down to Sevenoaks and to Canterbury for the same purpose, spending a night at each place. I paid during July & August several visits. One to Burford Lodge, (Sir Trevor Lawrence’s;) memorable on which occasion was a certain walk we took (on a Sunday afternoon,) through the grounds of the Deepdene, an artificial but to me a most enchanting and most suggestive English place—full of foreign reminiscences; the sort of place that an Englishman of 80 years ago, who had made the grand tour and lingered in Italy would naturally construct. I went to Leatherhead, & I went twice to Mentmore. (On one of these occasions Mr. Gladstone was there.) I went to Fredk. Macmillan’s at Walton-on-Thames, & had some charming moments on the river. Then I went down into Somerset & spent a week at Midelney Place, the Cely Trevilians’. It is the impression of this visit that I wish not wholly to fade away. Very exquisite it was (not the visit, but the impression of the country;) it kept me a-dreaming, all the while I was there. It seemed to me very old England; there was a peculiarly mellow and ancient feeling in it all. Somerset is not especially beautiful; I have seen much better English scenery. But I think I have never been more penetrated—I have never more loved the land. It was the old houses that fetched me—Montacute, the admirable; Barrington, that superb Ford Abbey, & several smaller ones. Trevilian showed me them all; he has a great care for such things. These delicious old houses, in the long August days, in the South of England air, on the soil over which so much has passed & out of which so much has come, rose before me like a series of visions. I thought of a thousand things; what becomes of the things one thinks of at these times? They are not lost, we must hope; they drop back into the mind again, and they enrich and embellish it. I thought of stories, of dramas, of all the life of the past,—of things one can hardly speak of; speak of, I mean, at the time. It is art that speaks of those things; & the idea makes me adore her more & more. Such a house as Montacute, so perfect, with its grey personality, its old-world gardens, its accumulations of expression, of tone—such a house is really, au fond, an ineffaceable image; it can be trusted to rise before the eyes in the future. But what we think of with a kind of serrement de coeur is the gone-&-left-behind-us emotion with which at the moment we stood and looked at it. The picture may live again; but that is part of the past. x x x x x x
Cambridge, Dec. 26th. x x x x x x
I came here on the 23d, to spend Xmas, Wilky having come on from the West (the first time in several years,) to meet me. Here I sit writing in the old back sitting room which William & I used to occupy & which I now occupy alone—or sometimes with poor Wilky, whom I have not seen in some eleven years, & who is wonderfully unchanged for a man with whom life has not gone easy. The long interval of years drops away, & the edges of the chasm “piece together” again, after a fashion. The feeling of that younger time comes back to me in which I sat here scribbling, dreaming, planning, gazing out upon the world in which my fortune was to seek, & suffering tortures from my damnable state of health. It was a time of suffering so keen that that fact might seem to give its dark colour to the whole period; but this is not what I think of to-day. When the burden of pain has been lifted, as many memories & emotions start into being as the little insects that scramble about when, in the country, one displaces a flat stone. Ill-health, physical suffering, in one’s younger years is a grievous trial; but I am not sure that we do not bear it most easily then. In spite of it we feel the joy of youth; and that is what I think of to-day among the things that remind me of the past. The freshness of impression and desire, the hope, the curiosity, the vivacity, the sense of the richness and mystery of the world that lies before us,—there is an enchantment in all that which it takes a heavy dose of pain to quench and which in later hours, even if success have come to us, touches us less nearly. Some of my doses of pain were very heavy; very weary were some of my months and years. But all that is sacred; it is idle to write of it to-day. x x x x x x x x x
What comes back to me freely, delightfully, is the visions of those untried years. Never did a poor fellow have more; never was an ingenuous youth more passionately and yet more patiently eager for what life might bring. Now that life has brought something, brought a measurable part of what I dreamed of then, it is touching enough to look back. I know at last what I wanted then—to see something of the world. I have seen a good deal of it, and I look at the past in the light of this knowledge. What strikes me is the definiteness, the unerringness of those longings. I wanted to do very much what I have done, and success, if I may say so, now stretches back a tender hand to its younger brother, desire. I remember the days, the hours, the books, the seasons, the winter skies and darkened rooms of summer. I remember the old walks, the old efforts, the old exaltations and depressions. I remember more than I can say here to-day.
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Again, in New York the other day, I had to break off: I was trying to finish the little history of the past year. There is not much more to be said about it. I came back from Midelney, to find Alice in London, and spent ten days with her there, very pleasantly, at the end of August. Delightful to me is London at that time, after the horrors of the Season have spent themselves, and the long afternoons make a cool grey light in the empty West End. Deli
ghtful to me, too, it was to see how she enjoyed it—how interesting was the impression of the huge, mild city. London is mild then; that is the word. And then I went to Scotland—to Tillypronie, to Cortachy, to Dalmeny, to Laidlawstiel. I was to have wound up, on my way back, with Castle Howard; but I retracted, on account of Lord Airlie’s death. I can’t go in to all this; there were some delightful moments, and Scotland made, as it had made before, a great impression. Perhaps what struck me as much as anything was my drive, in the gloaming, over from Kirriemuir to Cortachy; though taking the road afterward by daylight, I saw it was commonplace. In the late Scotch twilight, & the keen air, it was romantic: at least it was romantic to ford the river at the entrance to Cortachy, to drive through the dim avenues and up to the great lighted pile of the castle, where Lady A., hearing my wheels on the gravel (I was late) put her handsome head from a window in the clock-tower, asked if it was I, and wished me a bonny good-evening. I was in a Waverley Novel. Then my drive (with her) to Glamys; and my drive (with Miss Stanley) to Airlie Castle, enchanting spot! Dalmeny is delicious, a magnificent pile of woods beside the Forth; & the weather, while I was there, was the loveliest I have ever known in the British isles. But the company was not interesting, and there was a good deal of dreariness in the ball we all went to at Hopetoun for the coming of age of the heir. A charming heir he was, however, and a very pretty picture of a young nobleman stepping into his place in Society—handsome, well-mannered, gallant, graceful, with 40 000 £ a year and the world at his feet. Laidlawstiel, on a bare hill among hills, just above the Tweed, is in the midst of Walter Scott’s country. Reay walked with me over to Achistiel one lovely afternoon; it is only an hour away. The house has been greatly changed since the “Sheriff’s” day; but the place, the country, are the same, and I found the thing deeply interesting. It took me back. While I was at the Reays’ I took up one of Scott’s novels—Redgauntlet; it was years since I had read one. They have always a charm for me—but I was amazed at the badness of R.; l’enfance de l’art.
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Now and here, I have only one feeling—the desire to get at work again. It is nearly six months that I have been resting on my oars—letting the weeks go, with nothing to show for them but these famous “impressions”! Prolonged idleness exasperates & depresses me, and though now that I am here, it is a pity not to move about and (if the chance presents itself) see the country, the prospect of producing nothing for the rest of the winter is absolutely intolerable to me. If it comes to my having to choose between remaining stationary somewhere and getting at work, or making a journey during which I shall be able to do no work, I shall certainly elect for the former. But probably I shall be able to compromise: to see something of the country & yet work a little. My mind is full of plans, of ambitions; they crowd upon me, for these are the productive years of life. I have taken aboard by this time a tremendous quantity of material; I really have never taken stock of my cargo. After long years of waiting, of obstruction, I find myself able to put into execution the most cherished of all my projects—that of beginning to work for the stage. It was one of my earliest—I had it from the first. None has given me brighter hopes—none has given me sweeter emotions. It is strange never the less that I should never have done anything—& to a certain extent it is ominous. I wonder at times that the dream should not have faded away. It comes back to me now, however, & I ache with longing to settle down at last to a sustained attempt in this direction. I think there is really reason enough for my not having done so before: the little work at any time that I could do, the uninterrupted need of making money on the spot, the inability to do two things at once, the absence of opportunities, of openings. I may add to this the feeling that I could afford to wait, that, looked at as I look at it, the drama is the ripest of all the arts, the one to which one must bring most of the acquired as well as most of the natural, and that while I was waiting I was studying the art, and clearing off my field. I think I may now claim to have studied the art as well as it can be studied in the contemplative way. The French stage I have mastered: I say that without hesitation. I have it in my pocket, and it seems to me clear that this is the light by which one must work to-day. I have laid up treasures of wisdom about all that. What interesting hours it has given me—what endless consideration it has led to! Sometimes, as I say, it seems to me simply deplorable that I should not have got at work before. But it was impossible at the time, and I knew that my chance would come. Here it is: let me guard it sacredly now. Let nothing divert me from it; but now the loss of time, which has simply been a maturing process, will become an injurious one. Je me résume, as George Sand’s heroes say. I remember certain occasions; several acute visitations of the purpose of which I write come back to me vividly. Some of them, the earliest, were brought on merely by visits to the theatre—by seeing great actors, &c—at fortunate hours; or by reading a new piece of Alex. Dumas, of Sardou, of Augier. No, my dear friend, nothing of all that is lost. Ces [é]motions-là ne se perdent pas; elle[s] rentrent dans le fonds même de notre nature; elle[s] font partie de notre volonté. The volonté has not expired; it is only perfect to-day. Two or three of the later occasions of which I speak have been among the things that count in the formation of a purpose; they are worth making a note of here. What has always counted, of course, has been the Comédie Française; it is on that, as regards this long day-dream, that I have lived. But there was an evening there that I shall long remember; it was in September 1877. I had come over from London; I was lodging in the Avenue d’Antin—the house with a tir behind it. I went to see Jean Dacier, with Coquelin as the hero; I shall certain[ly not] forget that impression. The piece is, on the whole, I suppose, bad; but it contains some very effective scenes, and the two principal parts gave Coquelin & Favart a magnificent chance. It is Coquelin’s great chance, and he told me afterwards in London that it is the part he values most. He is everything in it by turns, and I don’t think I ever followed an actor’s creation more intently. It threw me into a great state of excitement; I thought seriously of writing to Coquelin, telling him I had been his school-mate &c. It held up a glowing light to me—seemed to point to my own path. If I could have sat down to work then I probably should not have stopped soon. But I didn’t; I couldn’t; I was writing things for which I needed to be paid from month to month. (I like to remind myself of these facts—to justify my innumerable postponements.[)] I remember how, on leaving the theatre—it was a lovely evening—I walked about a long time under the influence not so much of the piece as of Coquelin’s acting of it, which had made the thing so human, so brilliant, so valuable. I was agitated with what it said to me that I might do—what I ought to attempt; I walked about the Place de la Concorde, along the Seine, up the Champs Elysées. That was nothing, however, to the state I was thrown into by meeting Coquelin at breakfast at Andrew Lang’s, when the Comédie Française came to London. The occasion, for obvious reasons, was unpropitious, but I had some talk with him which rekindled and revived all my latent ambitions. At that time too my hands were tied; I could do nothing, and the feeling passed away in smoke. But it stirred me to the depths. Coquelin’s personality, his talk, the way the artist overflowed in him,—all this was tremendously suggestive. I could say little to him there—not a tittle of what I wished; I could only listen, and translate to him what they said—an awkward task! But I listened to some purpose, and I have never lost what I gained. It excited me powerfully; I shall not forget my walk, afterwards, down from South Kensington to Westminster. I met Jack Gardner, & he walked with me to leave a card at the Speaker’s House. All day, & for days afterward, I remained under the impression. It faded away, in time, & I had to give myself to other things. But this brings it back to me; and I may say that those two little moments were landmarks. There was a smaller incident, later, which it gives me pleasure to recall, as it gave me extreme pleasure at the time. John Hare asked me (I met him at dinner, at the Comyns Carrs’,)—urged me, I may say—to write a play, and of
fered me his services in the event of my doing so. I shall take him at his word. When I came back from Scotland in October last I was full of this work; my hands were free; my pocket lined; I would have given a £100 for the liberty [to] sit down and hammer away. I imagined such a capital winter of work. But I had to come hither instead. If that however involves a loss of part of my time, it needn’t involve the loss of all!
Feb. 9th 1882. x x x x x x x x x x x
102 Mt. Vernon St. Boston. x x