Horatia K. F. Eden - Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books

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* * * * *

March 22, 1882.

* * * * *

On Saturday night I went down with A. and L. to Battersea, to one of
the People's Concerts. I enclose the programme. It is years since I
have enjoyed anything so much as _Thomas's_ Harp-playing. (He is not
Ap-Thomas, but he _is_ the Queen's Harper.) His hands on those strings
were the hands of a _Wizard_, and form and features nearly as quaint
as those of Mawns seemed to dilate into those of a poet. It was very
marvellous.

Did I tell you that Lady L. has sent _me_ a ticket this year for her
Sunday afternoons at the Grosvenor? We went on Sunday. The paintings
there just now are Watts's. Our old blind friend at Manchester has
sent a lot. It is a very fine collection. I think few paintings do
beat Watts's 'Love and Death'--Death, great and irresistible, wrapped
in shrowd-like drapery, is pushing relentlessly over the threshold of
a home, where the portal is climbed over by roses and a dove plays
about the lintel. You only see his back. But, facing you, Love, as a
young boy, torn and flushed with passion and grief, is madly striving
to keep Death back, his arms strained, his wings crushed and broken in
the unequal struggle.

Beside the paintings it was great fun seeing the company! Princess
Louise was there, and lots of minor stars. And--my Welsh Harper was
there! I had a long chat with him. He talks like a true artist, and
WE must know him hereafter. When I said that when I heard him
play the 'Men of Harlech,' I understood how Welshmen fought in the
valleys if their harpers played upon the hills (_most true!_), he
seized my hand in both his, and thanked me so excitedly I was quite
alarmed for fear Mrs. Grundy had an eye round the corner!!!

* * * * *

_Amesbury_, May 28, 1182.

... 'Tis a sweet, sweet spot! Not one jot or one tittle of the old
charm has forsaken it. Clean, clean shining streets and little
houses, pure, pure air!--a changeful and lovely sky--the green
watermeads and silvery willows--the old patriarch in his smock--the
rushing of the white weir among the meadows, the grey bridge, the big,
peaceful, shading trees, the rust-coloured lichen on the graves where
the forefathers of the hamlet sleep (oh what a place for sleep!), the
sublime serenity of that incomparable church tower, about which the
starlings wheel, some of them speaking words outside, and others
replying from the inside (where they have no business to be!) through
the belfry windows in a strange chirruping antiphon, as if outside
they sang:

"Have you found a house, and a nest where you may lay your young?

(and from within):

Even Thy altars, O Lord of Hosts! my King and my God!"

D. and I wandered (how one _wanders_ here) a long time there yesterday
evening. Then we went up to the cemetery on the hill, with that
beautiful lych-gate you were so fond of. I picked you a forget-me-not
from the old Rector's grave, for he has gone home, after fifty-nine
years' pastorship of Amesbury. His wife died the year before. Their
graves are beautifully kept with flowers.

_Whit-Monday_, 9.30 p.m. We are in the upper sitting-room to-day, the
lower one having been reserved for "trippers." It is a glorious
night--beyond the open window one of several Union Jacks waves in the
evening breeze, and one of several brass bands has just played its way
up the street. How these admirable musicians have found the lungs to
keep it up as they have done since an early hour this morning they
best know! Oh, how we have laughed! How _you_ would have laughed!! It
has been the most good-humoured, civil crowd you can imagine! Such
banners! such a "gitting of them" up and down the street by ardent
"Foresters" and other clubs in huge green sashes and flowers
everywhere! Before we were up this morning they were hanging flags
across the street, and seriously threatening the stability of that
fine old window!

When I was dressed enough to pull up the blind and open the window
some green leaves fluttered in in the delicious breeze. I went off
into raptures, thinking it was a big _Vine_ I had not noticed before,
creeping outside!!

It was a maypole of sycamore branches, placed there by the
Foresters!!!

Frances Peard laughed at me much for something like to this I said at
Torquay! She said, "You are just like my old mother. Whenever we pass
a man who has used a fusee, she always becomes knowing about tobacco,
and says, _There_, Frances, my dear--there IS a fine cigar.'"

* * * * *

... We came here last Thursday. When I got to Porton D. had sent an
air-cushion in the fly, and though I had a five miles drive it was
through this exquisite air on a calm, lovely evening, and by the time
we got to a spot on the Downs where a little Pinewood breaks the
expanse of the plains, the good-humoured driver and I were both on our
knees on the grass digging up plots of the exquisite Shepherd's Thyme,
which carpets the place with blue!

Yesterday we drove by Stonehenge to Winterbourne Stoke. It was
glaring, and I could not do much sketching, but the drive over the
downs was like drinking in life at some primeval spring. (And this
though the wind did give me acute neuralgia in my right eye, but yet
the air was so exquisitely refreshing that I could cover my eye with a
handkerchief and still enjoy!) The charm of these unhedged, unbounded,
un-"cabined, cribbed, confined" _prairies_ is all their own, and very
perfect! And _such_ flowers _enamel_ (it _is_ a good simile in spite
of Alphonse Karr!) the close fine grass! The pale-yellow rock cistus
in clumps, the blue "shepherd's thyme" in tracts of colour, sweet
little purple-capped orchids, spireas and burnets, and everywhere "the
golden buttercup" in sheets of gleaming yellow, and the soft wind
blows and blows, and the black-nosed sheep come up the leas, and I
drink in the breeze! Oh, those flocks of black-faced lambs and sheep
are TOO-TOO! and I must tell you that the old Wiltshire
"ship-dog" is nearly extinct. I regret to say that he is not found
equal to "the Scotch" in business habits, and one see Collies
everywhere now....

_London._ June 29, 1882.

* * * * *

I had a great treat last Sunday. One you and I will share when you
come home. D., U., and I took Jack to church at the Chelsea Hospital,
and we went round the Pensioners' Rooms, kitchen, sick-wards, etc.
afterwards, with old Sir Patrick Grant and Col. Wadeson, V.C. (Govr.
and Lieut.-Govr.), and a lot of other people.

It is an odd, perhaps a savage, mixture of emotions, to kneel at one's
prayers with some _pride_ under fourteen French flags--_captured_
(including one of Napoleon's while he was still Consul, with a red cap
of Liberty as big as your hat!), and hard by the FIVE bare
staves from which the FIVE standards taken at Blenheim have
rotted to dust!--and then to pass under the great Russian standard
(twenty feet square, I should say!) that is festooned above the door
of the big hall. If Rule Britannia IS humbug--and we are mere
Philistine Braggarts--why doesn't Cook organize a tour to some German
or other city, where we can sit under fourteen captured British
Colours, and be disillusioned once for all!!! Where is the Hospital
whose walls are simply decorated like some Lord Mayor's show with
trophies taken from us and from every corner of the world? (You know
Lady Grant was in the action at Chillianwallah and has the medal?) We
saw two Waterloo men, and Jack was handed about from one old veteran
to another like a toy. "Grow up a brave man," they said, over and over
again. But "The Officer," as he called Colonel Wadeson, was his chief
pride, he being in full uniform and cocked hat!!

And I must tell you--in the sick ward I saw a young man, fair-curled,
broad-chested, whose face seemed familiar. He was with Captain
Cleather at the Aldershot Gym., fell, and is "going home"--slowly, and
with every comfort and kindness about him, but of spinal paralysis.
It _did_ seem hard lines! He was at the Amesbury March Past, and we
had a long chat about it.

* * * * *

July 21, 1882.

* * * * *

I cannot tell you how it pleases me that you liked the bit about
Aldershot in "Laetus." I hope that it must have _grated_ very much if I
had done it badly or out of taste, on any one who knows it as well as
you do; and that its moving your sympathies does mean that I have done
it pretty well. I cannot tell you the pains I expended on it! All
those sentences about the Camp were written in scraps and corrected
for sense and euphony, etc., etc., bit by bit, like "Jackanapes"!!!
Did I tell you about "Tuck of Drum"? Several people who saw the proof,
pitched into me, "Never heard of such an expression." I was convinced
I knew it, and as I said, as a _poetical_ phrase; but I could not
charge my memory with the quotation: and people exasperated me by
regarding it as "camp slang." I got Miss S. to look in her
_Shakespeare's Concordance_, but in vain, and she wrote severely, "My
Major lifts his eyebrows at the term." I was in despair, but I sent
the proof back, trusting to my instincts, and sent a postcard to Dr.
Littledale, and got a post-card back by return--"Scott"--"Rokeby."

"With burnished brand and musketoon,
So gallantly you come,
I rede you for a bold dragoon,
That lists the tuck of drum."--
"I list no more the tuck of drum,
No more the trumpet hear;
But when the beetle sounds his hum,
My comrades take the spear."

And I copied this on to another postcard and added, _Tell your Major!_
and despatched it to Miss S.! She said, "You _did_ Cockadoodle!"--

But isn't it _exquisite_? _What_ a creature Scott was! Could words,
could a long romance, give one a finer picture of the ex-soldier
turned "Gentleman of the Road"? The touch of regret--"I list no more
the tuck of drum," and the soldierly necessity for a "call"--and then
_such_ a call!

When the Beetle _sounds his hum_--

The Dor Beetle!--

I hope you will like the tale as a whole. It has been long in my head.

* * * * *

Oh! how funny Grossmith was! Yesterday I was at the Matinee for the
Dramatic School, and he did a "Humorous Sketch" about Music, when he
said with care-carked brows that there was only one man's music that
_thoroughly_ satisfied him (after touching on the various
schools!)--and added--"my own." It was inexpressibly funny. His
"Amateur Composer" would have made you die!

Ah, but THE treat, such a treat as I have not heard for
years--was that old Ristori RECITED the 5th Canto of the
_Inferno_. I did not remember which it was, and feared I should not be
able to follow, but it proved to be "Francesca." Never could I have
believed it possible that reciting could be like that. I could have
gone into a corner and cried my heart out afterwards, the tension was
so extreme. And oh what power and WHAT refinement!

* * * * *

July 28, 1882.

* * * * *

Last Saturday D. and I went down to Aldershot to the Flat Races!!! As
we went along, tightly packed in a carriage full of ladies in what may
be termed "dazzling toilettes," pretty girls and Dowager Mammas
everywhere!--and as we ran past the familiar "Brookwood North Camp,"
where white "canvas" shone among the heather (and the heather, the cat
heather, oh SO bonny! with here and there a network of the
red threads of the dodder, so thick that it looked like red flowers),
and all the ladies, young and old, craned forward to see the tents,
etc., I really laughed at myself for the accuracy of my own
descriptions in "Laetus"! P. met us at the R.E. Mess, where we had
luncheon. After lunch we went to the familiar stables, and inspected
the kit for Egypt. Then P. drove us to the Race Course. I met a lot of
old friends. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught were there. It all
looked very pretty, the camp is so much grown up with plantations now.
The air was wondrous sweet. P. drove us back to the Mess for tea, and
then down to the station. It was a great pleasure, though rather a sad
one. Everybody was very grave. A sort of feeling, "What will be the
end?"...

_The Castle, Farnham._
Aug. 17, 1882.

* * * * *

It is one of the sides of X.'s mind which makes me feel her so
_limited_ an artist that she seems almost to take up a school as she
takes up a lady-friend--"one down another come on." I think her abuse
of Wagner now curiously _narrow_. I can't see why one should not feel
the full spell and greater purity of Brahms without dancing in his
honour on Wagner's bones!! It seems like her refusing to see any merit
in, or derive any enjoyment from modern pictures because she has been
"posted" in the Early Italian School. So from year to year these good
people who have been to Florence will not even look at a painting by
Brett or Peter Graham, though by the very qualities and senses through
which one feels the sincerity, the purity, the nobleness, and the fine
colour of those great painters, the photographs of whose pictures even
stir one's heart,--one surely ought also to take delight in a
landscape school which simply did not exist among the ancients. If sea
and sky as GOD spreads them before our eyes are admirable, I
can't think how one can be blind to delight in such pictures as 'The
Fall of the Barometer,' 'The Incoming Tide,' or Leader's 'February
Fill-dyke.' Things which no Florentine ever approached, as transcripts
of Nature's mood apart from man....

Yesterday we had a most delicious drive through the heather and pines
to Crookham. Ah, 'tis a bonny country, and I _did_ laugh when I said
to Mr. Walkinshaw, "How glorious the heather is this year!" and he
said, "Yes. If only it was growing on its native heath." For a minute
I couldn't tell what he meant. Then I discovered that he regards
heather as the exclusive property of bonnie Scotland!!!

I think you will be pleased to hear that I did, what I have long
wanted, yesterday. Thoroughly made Mrs. Walkinshaw's acquaintance, and
thanked her for that old invitation we never accepted to go there to
see the Chinnerys' sketches. How Scotch and _kindly_ she is! She
insisted on bringing her husband and daughters to be introduced, and
sent _warmest_ messages to you. She said she feared you must have
quite forgotten her; but I told her she was quite wrong there! She
says she has a little Chinnery she meant to give me long ago, and she
insists on sending it....

Sept. 1, 1882.

* * * * *

I must tell you that I had such a mixture of pain and pleasure at
Britwell in the nearest approach to Trouve I have ever known. A larger
dog, and not quite so "Moecent," but in character and ways his living
image. The same place on his elbow (which his Aunt was always wanting
to gum a bit of astrachan on to); he "took" to his Aunt at once!
_Nero_ by name. The sweetest temper. I have kissed the nice soft
places on his black lips and shaken hands by the hour!!! Yesterday the
others went to a garden-party, so I went on to the Downs to sketch,
and when the dogs saw me, off they came, Nero delighted, and little
Punch the Pug. They came with me all the way, and lay on the grass
while I was sketching, and Nero kept sitting down to save a corner,
and watch which way I meant to go, just like dear True! [_Sketch._]
They were very good, sitting with me on the downs, but they roamed
away into the woods after game a good deal on the road home!...

_Grenoside._ Oct 5, 1882.

* * * * *

I do so long to hear how you like the end of "Laetus." As F.S.'s tale
turned out seven pages longer than was accounted for, I had to cut out
some of _my_ story, and so have missed the point of its being S.
Martin's Day on which Leonard died. S. Martin was a soldier-saint, and
the Tug-of-War Hymn is only sung on Saints' Days.

I have completed a tale[42] for the November No., and gave a rough
design to Andre for the illustration, which will be in colours. I hope
you will like _that_. There is not a tear in it this time! "Laetus" was
too tragic!

[Footnote 42: "Sunflowers and a Rushlight," vol. xvi.]

* * * * *

Will we or will we not have a Persian Puss in our new home by the name
of--Marjara?--It is quite perfect! Do Brahmans like cats? I must
have a tale about Marjara!!!--

Karava is grand too!

Oh Karava!
Oh the Crier!
Oh Karava!
Oh the Shouter!
Oh Karava, oh the Caller!
Very glossy are your feathers,
Very thievish are your habits,
Black and green and purple feathers,
Bold and bad your depredations!!!

Doesn't he sound like a fellow in _Hiawatha_?

Oh, it's a fine language, and must have fine _lils_ in it!

* * * * *

TO MRS. JELF.

_Ecclesfield._ Oct. 10, 1882.

MY DEAREST MARNY,

Your dear, kind letter was very pleasant sweetmeat and encouragement.
I am deeply pleased you like the end of "Laetus"--and feel it to the
point--and that my polishings were not in vain! I polished that last
scene to distraction in "the oak room" at Offcote!

I should _very_ much like to hear how it hits the General. I think
"_Pav_ilions" (as my Yorkshire Jane used to call civilians!) may get a
little mixed, and not care so much for the points. Some who have been
rather extra kind about it are--Lady W---- (but yesterday she
amusingly insisted that she _had_ lived in camp ---- at
Wimbledon!!)--the Fursdons and "Stella Austin," author of _Stumps_,
etc.--(literary "civilians" who think it the best thing I have ever
done), and two young barristers who have been reading it aloud to each
other in the Temple--with tears. And yet I fancy many non-military
readers may get mixed. P. vouchsafes no word of it to _me_, but I hear
from D. (under the veil of secrecy!) that he and Mr. Anstruther read
it together in Egypt with much approval. I am more pleased by military
than non-military approval. Old Aldershottians would so easily spot
blunders and bad taste!!! Mrs. Murray wrote to me this morning about
it--and of course wished they were back in dear old Aldershot!

You make me very egotistical, but I DO wish you to tell me
what you, _and_ Aunty, _and_ Madre think of "Sunflowers and a
Rushlight," when you read it. I fear it has rather scandalized my
Aunt, who is staying with us. She is obviously shocked at the
plain-speaking about drains and doctors, and thinks that part ought to
have been in an essay--not in a child's tale. I am a little troubled,
and should _really_ like (what is seldom soothing!) a candid opinion
from _each of you_. You know how I think the riding _some_ hobbies
takes the _fine edge_ off the mind, and if you think I am growing
coarse in the cause of sanitation--I beseech you to tell me! As to
putting _the teaching_ into an essay--the crux there is that the
people one wants to stir up about sanitation are just good family folk
with no special literary bias; and they will read a tale when they
won't read an essay! But do tell me if any one of you feel that the
subject _grates_, or my way of putting it.

Now, my darling, I must tell you that I have got a telegram from my
goodman--the Kapellmeister!--to say he IS to be sent home in
"early spring." This is a great comfort. I would willingly have let
him stay two months longer to escape spring cold; but he has got to
_hate_ the place so fiercely, that I now long for him to get away at
any cost. It must be most depressing! The last _letter_ I got, he had
had a trip by sea, and said he felt perfectly different till he got
back to Colombo, when the oppression seized him again. He has been to
Trincomalee, and is charmed with it, and said he could read small
print when he got there, but his eyes quite fail in the muggyness of
Colombo. However he will cheer up now, I hope! and Nov. and Dec. and
Jan. are good months.

Now good-bye, dear. My best love to Aunty and Madre.

Your loving,
J.H.E.

TO A.E.

_Ecclesfield._ October 24, 1882.

... It was very vexatious that the Megha Duta came just too late for
last mail. It is a beautiful poem. Every now and then the local colour
has a weird charm all its own. It lifts one into another land (without
any jarring of railway or steamship!) to realize the _locale_ in which
rearing masses of grey cumuli suggest elephants rushing into combat!
And the husband's picture of his wife in his absence is as noble, as
sympathetic, and as perceptive as anything of the kind I ever read.
So full of human feeling and so refined. I enjoyed it very much. It
reminded me, oddly enough, more than once of Young's _Night Thoughts_.
I think perhaps (if the charm of another tongue, and the wonder of its
antiquity did not lead one to give both more _attention_ and more
_sympathy_ than one would perhaps bestow on an English poem) that the
poem does not rank much higher than a degree short of the first rank
of our poets. But it is very charming. And oh, what a lovely text! It
is a _most beautiful_ character....

TO MRS. MEDLEY.

_Ecclesfield, Sheffield._
November 17, 1822.

MY VERY DEAR MRS. MEDLEY,

There has been long word silence between us! I made a break in it the
other day by sending you my new "Picture Poem"--"A Week Spent in a
Glass Pond."

It was a sort of repayment of a tender chromolithographic (!) debt.

Do you remember, when Fredericton was our home, and when everything
pretty from Old England did look so very pretty--how on one of those
home visits from which he brought back bits of civilization--the
Bishop brought _me_ a "chromo" of dogs and a fox which has hung in
every station we've had since?

Now--as a friend's privilege is--I will talk without fear or favour of
myself! The last real contact with you was the Bishop's too brief peep
at us in Bowdon--a shadowy time out of which his Amethyst ring flashes
on my mind's eye. No! Not Amethyst--what IS the name? Sapphire!--(I have
a little mental confusion on the subject. I have a weak--a very weak
corner--in my heart for another Bishop, an old friend of your
Bishop's--Bishop Harold Browne; and have had the honour now and again of
wearing his rings on my thumb--a momentary relaxation of discipline and
due respect, which I doubt if your Bishop would admit!!! though I hope
he has a little love for me, frightened as I now and then am of him!!!!
The last time but one I was at Farnham, I was asked to stay on another
two days to catch the Brownes' fortieth wedding-day. Just as we were
going down to dinner I reproached the Bishop for not having on his
"best" ring! Very luckily--for he said he always made a point of it on
his wedding-day--left me like a hot potato in the middle of the stairs
and flew off to his room, and returned with _the_ grand sapphire!)

Well, dear--that's a parenthesis--to go back to Bowdon. I was not to
boast of there, and after the move to York, and I had fitted up my
house and made up for lost time in writing work, I was a very much
broken creature, keeping going to Jenner and getting orders to
rest!--and then came the order to Malta, not six months after we were
sent to York, and I stayed to pack up and sent out all our worldly
goods and chattels, and then started myself, and was taken ill in
Paris and had to come back, and have been "of no account" for three
years.

Well. My news is now far better than once I hoped it ever could be.
I'm not strong, but I can work in moderation, though I can't "rackett"
the least bit. And--Rex is to come home in Spring!--the season of hope
and _nest-building_--and I am trying not to wonder my wits away as to
what part of the British Isles it will be in which I shall lay the
cross-sticks and put in the moss and wool of our next nest!! There is
every reason to suppose we shall be "at home" for five years, I am
thankful to say....

Rex loved Malta, and _hates_ Ceylon. But he has been _very_ good and
patient about it.

Latterly he has consoled himself a good deal with the study of Sanscrit,
which he means me also to acquire, though I have not got far yet! It is
a beautiful character. He says, "Of all the things I have tried Sanscrit
is the most utterly delicious! Of the alphabet alone there are (besides
the ten vowels and thirty-three simple consonants) rather more than two
hundred compound consonants," etc., etc.! He adds, "[Sanskrit: aayi]
are my detached initials, but I could write my whole name in
'Devanagiri,' or 'Writing of the Gods.'"

TO A.E.

_Ecclesfield._ December 8, 1882.

... I got back from Liverpool on Monday. When I called at the Museum
on that morning a Dr. Palmer was there, who said, "I was in Taku Forts
with your husband," and was very friendly. He gave me a prescription
for neuralgia! and sent you his best remembrances.

First and last I have annexed one or two nice "bits of wool for our
nest." For _8s._ (a price for which I could not have bought _the
frame_, a black one with charming old-fashioned gold-beading of this
pattern) [_sketch_] I bought a real fine old soft mezzotint, after Sir
Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Richard Burke. Oh, such a lovely face!
Looking lovelier in powder and lace frill. But a charming thing, with
an old-fashioned stanza in English deploring his early death, and a
motto in Latin. It was a great find, and I carried it home from the
Pawnbroker's in triumph!--

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