To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived from Further Records (London, 1890), were written rather late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126] and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the subject that the present writer, in a long and wide experience, has come across.
45. To H—— [extract]
York Farm, Branchtown,
Philadelphia, Monday May 18th, 1874.
One evening that my maid was sitting in the room from which she could see the whole of the staircase and upper landing, she saw the door of my bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown, with a bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand come out, walk the whole length of the passage, and return again into the bedroom, shutting the door after her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room below in my usual black velvet evening dress; moreover, the person she had seen bore no resemblance either in figure or face to me, or to any member of my household, which consisted of three young servant women besides herself, and a negro man-servant. My maid was a remarkably courageous and reasonable person, and, though very much startled (for she went directly upstairs and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and mentioned the circumstance to nobody, though, as she told me afterwards, she was so afraid lest I should have a similar visitation, that she was strongly tempted to ask Dr. W——'s advice as to the propriety of mentioning her experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however, and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the same room, the man-servant came in to light the gas and made her start, observing which, he said, "Why, lors, Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a ghost." In spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied, "Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You don't believe in such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well," he said, "I don't know just so sure what to say to that, seeing it's very well known there was a ghost in this house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well, poor Mrs. R——'s ghost, it's very well known, walks about this house, and no great wonder either, seeing how miserably she lived and died here." To Ellen's persistent expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on, "Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (i.e. maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it"; and there the conversation ended. Some days after this, Ellen coming into the drawing-room to speak to me, stopped abruptly at the door, and stood there, having suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house, the face of the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any assignable reason whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my explanation of it; that she had heard, without paying any particular attention to it, some talk among the other servants about the ghost in the house, which had remained unconsciously to her in her memory, and reproduced itself in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.
46. To H—— [extract]
York Farm, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.
My dearest H——,
It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest in the sort of literary feat which I consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier—all Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars—and this absurd theory about Bacon, which was first broached a good many years ago, never obtained credit for a moment with them; nor did they ever entertain for an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by him. Now I am intimately acquainted and in frequent communication with William Donne, Edward FitzGerald, and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare scholars, and the latter a man who has just published a work upon Bacon, which has been really the labour of his life; none of these men, competent judges of the matter, ever mentions the question of "Who wrote Shakespeare?" except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so.
I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made thus on the personality of my greatest mental benefactor; and consider the whole thing a misapplication, not to say waste, of time and ingenuity that might be better employed. As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with love, veneration, and gratitude, and am proud and happy to be his countrywoman, considering it among the privileges of my English birth, I resent the endeavour to prove that he deserved none of these feelings, but was a mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any interest for you, for I should not have supposed you imagined Shakespeare had not written his own plays, Irish though you be. Do you remember the servant's joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the cook asks, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the others answers, with, at any rate, partial plausibility, "Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure!"
