THE LAST OF THE GREAT KEMBLES
Fanny Kemble : A Passionate Victorian. By Margaret Armstrong. (Macmillan. 15s.)
THERE can be no shadow of doubt about the quality of this absorbing book. It is a superb human document. Never was there portrait of a notable woman more faithfully or more lovingly limned. Theatrical biography is far from being every man's meat, but Miss Margaret Armstrong has accomplished the rare feat of making it palatable to the million. In point, however, of subject and material, the conditions were so special that it is doubtful whether the feat could be repeated. If this able memoir of the last distinguished bearer of a great theatrical name has all the appeal of a good novel, it is because Miss Armstrong has thoroughly digested her data and taken pains to novelise them. Not but that she has full recognition of the limitations of honest biography. She keeps a tight rein on her bounding imagination and refrains from indulging is fictional conversations. Happily, there was no need to speak beyond her brief, the material being so abundant. Not only did Fanny Kemble leave several books of recollections, but, so remarkable was her highly complex personality that there are frequent records of her in the reminiscences of her contem- poraries. From these many strands, Miss Armstrong, inspired by sheer love of her subject, has, with consummate judgement, woven a fabric of charm and endurability.
This is theatrical biography with a difference, for the very good reason that to Fanny Kemble theatrical life was never all- absorbing. Although she came of player-folk on both sides, she had throughout her long life a positive loathing for the stage. Nothing but necessity compelled her to take to the boards, and, although the footlights had for her none of their wonted fascinations, she triumphed by sheer strength of will. Undoubtedly she had histrionic powers, but her supreme art was the art of living not the art of faking emotions. All pretence was to her abomination. In the beginning she was more inclined to write than to act and wrote a play long before she had any notion of going on the stage. At divers times she made considerable sums of money with her pen. It was her lot to pursue several careers with bland impartiality and to fail in none save in that of wife. Readings nowadays are so little in vogue that it will come as a surprise to the rising generation to learn that as a reader of Shakespeare she prospered exceedingly for many years on end on both sides of the Atlantic, but it needs to be recalled that in the mid-nineteenth century' there was a large middle-class public both here and in America much too puritanical to countenance the theatre and yet avid for some sort of intellectual entertainment. Once again the old Anglo-Saxon genius for compromise had its exposition.
One of the charms of the book is that it not only affords us a microcosm of the Victorian age but yields a telling picture of rough and rugged young America busily engaged in working out its own salvation. As one turns the leaves one's interest centres not in Fanny's work but in Fanny herself, so intriguing is her personality. Impulsive, unconventional, high-princip1-1 and morally courageous, she was a bundle.of contradictions th, at once perplexed and delighted. Despite lingering traces
the old prejudice against the genus player, she moved freely in Society, as if by divine right, and could pick and choo,.e her intimates. All went swimmingly until she made the ugliest of blunders in choosing a helpmate. It passes under- standing why she should have elected to give her hand to a no doubt rich Georgia planter, one Pierce Butler, she who had an abiding horror of slavery. It was a bitter irony of circumstance, for by taking the step she was compelled to obtain first hand knowledge of the ghastliness of negro life in the old cotton fields and to shed many tears over her inability to soften any of its rigours. Not in vain, however, was this descent into Hell. In due season she recorded her impressions in a book entitled Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation,
and that book sent a wave of feeling over England which
effectively checked her from committing the terrible blunder of lending her aid to the cause of the South. But further and much greater suffering awaited the noble-minded abolitionist. Pierce and Fanny fell apart : they were incom- patibles. A legal separation ensued, and the disgraceful American law of the time denied Fanny access to her two children. There were years of waiting before mother and daughters could come together. Then, and then only, did the
storm-tossed woman attain safe harbourage. The end was frosty but kindly. The high-spirited young girl who had seen Edmund Kean in his decline and fall lived long enough to enjoy the friendship of Henry James. This was a happy circumstance, for to Henry James gratitude is due for giving to the world the crispest and most satisfying analysis of Fanny's complex personality. Of her he wrote in his Essays on London :
" She was the rarest of women, one of the finest and most original of talkers. She wrote exactly as she talked, observing, asserting, complaining, confiding, contradicting, crying out and bounding off, always effectually communicating. . . . A prouder nature never affronted the long humiliation of life. The faculty. of self-derision was never richer or droller. . . . She was composed of contrasts and opposites : an extraordinary mixture of incongruous things, of England and France in her blood, of America and England in her relationships, of the footlights and the glaciers in her activities, of conformity and contumacy in her character and tragedy and comedy in her talk."
Dates in the book are surprisingly few, hardly more than a dozen in all, but such is the grip and glamour of the narrative
that one is little troubled by the absence of such signposts.
The main thing is that readableness has not been achieved at the expense of accuracy. Only one slip is observable. We are told that Murray, the noted Edinburgh theatrical manager, married Tom Moore's sister, whereas his wife, formerly Miss Dyke, was a sister of Mrs. Tom Moore. But in a cursedly mechanistic age it is necessary to make at least one mistake in a book just to demonstrate that one is not a
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