Records of a Girlhood | Page 3

disease of the lungs rendered that industry impossible.
He endeavored to supply its place by giving French and drawing
lessons (I have several small sketches of his, taken in the Netherlands,
the firm, free delicacy of which attest a good artist's handling); and so
struggled on, under the dark London sky, and in the damp, foggy,
smoky atmosphere, while the poor foreign wife bore and nursed four
children.
It is impossible to imagine any thing sadder than the condition of such
a family, with its dark fortune closing round and over it, and its one
little human jewel, sent forth from its dingy case to sparkle and glitter,
and become of hard necessity the single source of light in the growing
gloom of its daily existence. And the contrast must have been cruel
enough between the scenes into which the child's genius spasmodically
lifted her, both in the assumed parts she performed and in the great
London world where her success in their performance carried her, and
the poor home, where sickness and sorrow were becoming abiding
inmates, and poverty and privation the customary conditions of
life--poverty and privation doubtless often increased by the very outlay
necessary to fit her for her public appearances, and not seldom by the
fear of offending, or the hope of conciliating, the fastidious taste of the
wealthy and refined patrons whose favor toward the poor little
child-actress might prove infinitely helpful to her and to those who
owned her.
The lives of artists of every description in England are not unapt to
have such opening chapters as this; but the calling of a player alone has

the grotesque element of fiction, with all the fantastic accompaniments
of sham splendor thrust into close companionship with the sordid
details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is a harlequin's
jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's cap and bells tied to the
beggar's wallet. I have said artist life in England is apt to have such
chapters; artist life everywhere, probably. But it is only in England, I
think, that the full bitterness of such experience is felt; for what knows
the foreign artist of the inexorable element of Respectability? In
England alone is the pervading atmosphere of respectability that which
artists breathe in common with all other men--respectability, that
English moral climate, with its neutral tint and temperate tone, so often
sneered at in these days by its new German title of Philistinism, so
often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some of its inexpressibly mean
manifestations--respectability, the pre-eminently unattractive
characteristic of British existence, but which, all deductions made for
its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the general result of the individual
self-respect of individual Englishmen; a wholesome, purifying, and
preserving element in the homes and lives of many, where, without it,
the recklessness bred of insecure means and obscure position would run
miserable riot; a tremendous power of omnipotent compression,
repression, and oppression, no doubt, quite consistent with the stern
liberty whose severe beauty the people of these islands love, but
absolutely incompatible with license, or even lightness of life,
controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societies where it does not
exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, and ludicrously tragical as are
the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it, saves especially the artist class
of England from those worst forms of irregularity which characterize
the Bohemianism of foreign literary, artistic, and dramatic life.
Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which
is the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my
mother's childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, and
to communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moral
nature. It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order of gifts that
have for their scope the exercise of the imagination through the senses,
no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet's passionate inspiration,
speaking to the senses through the imagination.

How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances that
influenced her childhood I know not. As I remember her, she was a
frank, fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably
found in the subsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield
for these virtues. How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and
most suffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can
better judge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience.
After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficulties of
every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption,
leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother,
not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and sole
support.
Nor was it many years before