Chapters from Some Memoirs

THE public likes memoirs to be "spicy," and especially loves the passages which ought to have been deleted. The public knows by this time that Mrs. Ritchie never remembers the things which she ought to forget, and so, in her new Chapters from Some Memoirs, the lover of things spicy cannot complain that he is disappointed. A severe critic might complain that the pages of childish recollections are a little vaporous, or, in simpler phrase, that there might be more plums in the pudding. But the pudding, if plain, the gruel, if thin, is excellently cooked. Unlike the people who stuff a fat book with famous people's names, the Captain Sumphs of this world, Mrs. Ritchie can write, and her manner wins us, even when (as occasionally here) there is a good deal more of manner than of matter.
The childish memories begin with Jasmin, the Provencal hairdresser bard. Miss Thackeray had read his works, and, at last, met him and another minstrel in Paris. But the other, Mr. Frederick Locker, she knew not for a poet, and Jasmin had "a head like the figurehead of a ship--a jolly, red, shiny, weather-beaten face, with large, round, prominent features, ornamented with little pomatumy wisps of hair... " She did not recognize the poet, and, indeed, few of our minstrels have looked the character, as did Lord Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Of musicians Miss Thackeray once met a curious example, and heard him play, the dying Chopin, "a slight, delicate-looking man, with long hair, bright eyes, and a thin, hooked nose." Men have died. and worms have eaten them, but not for love of George Sand, though Mrs. Ritchie mentions the incident, and we know how George loved and rode away, and made copy of what occurred. Miss Thackeray saw Mme. Dudevant herself once, "a stout," middle-aged woman, dressed in a stiff watered-silk dress, with a huge cameo, such as people then wore, at her throat. Her black shiny hair shone like polished ebony, she had a heavy red face, marked brows, great dark eyes, there was something-how shall I say it P-rather fierce, defiant, and set in her appearance, powerful, sulky, she frightened one a little. . . . George Sand looked half bored, half far-away; she neither lighted up nor awoke into greeting "-at the salutation of Mrs. Sartoris. As a girl, and as an old grandmother, George Sand must have been infinitely more attractive and amiable. But Miss Thackeray saw her apparently long before she was the loyal friend of Flaubert, and, of course, long after the date of Indiana.
-The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Vol. 78