subject to a domination at times somewhat irksome. “A little after twelve
my lady retired and intimated that he ought to do so too,” writes Moore;
“but he begged hard for ten minutes more.” Greville says that when
some revivalists called on Lord Holland, Lady Holland was with great
difficulty persuaded to allow him to go and receive them. “At last she
let him be wheeled in, but ordered Edgar and Harold, the two pages, to
post themselves outside the door and rush in if they heard Lord Holland
scream.” On the great occasion of Macaulay’s going to India, it is
recorded that the good-natured husband was goaded into a disciplinary
outburst: “Don’t talk such nonsense, my lady! What the devil! Can we tell
a gentleman who has a claim upon us that he must lose his only chance for
getting an independence in order that he may come and talk to you in an
evening?”
I repeat, it is a most curious thing to observe this mob of illustrious
and kindly gentlemen handing down to posterity such unanimous abuse of a
lady, who, whatever her defects, had done them infinite courtesies. And
she is dead and cannot defend herself.
She left a journal, however, which Lord Ilchester has lately edited.
And few studies can be more delightful than to turn from the picture
painted of her by her friends(?) to her intimate and faithful likeness of
herself. The tart, even the boisterous, tongue is indeed not concealed,
as when she told a political friend that “I regretted he had not lived
in the Middle Ages and given his faith to orthodox points, as he would
have made one of the firmest pillars of the church, instead of being a
milk and water politician now.” But there are many other things besides
tartness and boisterousness.
Unfortunately the Journal stops before the great days of Holland
House began. What would we not give for the lady’s account of those
conversations with Moore and Ticknor and Macaulay? What for portraits of
them and of others such as she well knew how to draw? For her pen was
no mean one. It could bite and sting, could emphasize lights and shadows
quite as strongly as some of those that etched the figures at her table
and the scenes in her drawing-room. You may meet such a type as the
following any day in Italy; but only an artist could so render it. “The
old Marchesa was also delightful, not to the eye, for she was hideous,
nor to the ear, for she squalled, nor to the nose, for she was an
Italian; yet, from her unbounded desire of pleasing, the _tout ensemble_
created more agreeable sensations than many more accomplished could have
inspired.” Or match this with an English married couple: “The first thing
she did was to live apart from him, and keep up a love correspondence
with him; hence to the world they appeared enamoured of one another. She
is a little mad, and parsimony is her chief turn. She is good-natured
and a little clever. Trevor has no judgment and slender talents. His
foibles are very harmless and his whole life has been insipidly good. His
_ridicules_ are a love of dress coats, _volantes_, and always speaking
French. _Au reste_, he is very like other people, only better.” And, as
will appear from these two, her portraits, though satirical, are not all
unkindly, or at least she sweetens the bitterest of them with a touch of
human charity.
Just a few sketches she has of the great men who afterwards became so
widely identified with her, enough to increase our ardent desire for
more. Thus the following of Wordsworth, interesting in every word for
both painter and painted, if somewhat astounding: “Sent an invitation
to Wordsworth, one of the Lake poets, to come and dine, or visit us
in the evening. He came. He is much superior to his writings, and his
conversation is even beyond his abilities. I should almost fear he is
disposed to apply his talents more towards making himself a _vigorous
conversationist_ in the style of our friend Sharp, than to improve his
style of composition.... He holds some opinions on picturesque subjects
with which I completely differ, especially as to the effects produced
by white houses on the sides of the hills; to my taste they produce a
cheerful effect. He, on the contrary, would brown, or even black-work
them; he maintained his opinion with a considerable degree of ingenuity.”
With which compare the snub administered by Henry Taylor, when she
sneered at Wordsworth’s poetry: “Let me beg you to believe, Lady Holland,
that this has not been the sort of thing to say about Wordsworth’s poetry
for the last ten years.”
But the Journal is far less interesting for its portraits of others than
for that of the lady herself, who is seen there complete, and human, and
not unlovely.
When she was young, she was beautiful. “I observed a portrait of Lady
Holland, painted some thirty years ago,” says Macaulay. “I could have
cried to see the change. She must have been a most beautiful woman.”
A mere child, she was married to a man she detested, who perhaps deserved
it. “At fifteen, through caprice and folly, I was thrown into the
power of one who was a pompous coxcomb, with youth, beauty, and a good
disposition, all to be so squandered!” I imagine that Sir Godfrey Webster
was a rough English squire of the Western type, fond of beef, beer,
hunting, and rural politics, fond also of his wife, after his fashion,
but believing that wives should bake, brew, and breed, and utterly
intolerant of my lady’s freaks and fancies, of her social ambitions and
her sentimental whims. To her he appeared a simple brute. When he “in a
paroxysm threw the book I was reading at my head, after having first torn
it out of my hands,” I can divine something of how he felt. So perhaps
could she; but the incident gave her all the gratification of martyrdom.
“Ah, me!” she writes, “what can please or cheer one who has no hope of
happiness in life? Solitude and amusement from external objects is all
I hope for; home is the abyss of misery!” Condemned to the exile of a
country house, I am sorry to say that she revenged herself by devising
cruel tricks against her husband’s aunt, who, however, was most apt at
paying back. Later her despair drove her nearly to suicide. “Oftentimes
in the gloom of midnight I feel a desire to curtail my grief, and but
for an unaccountable shudder that creeps over me, ere this the deed of
rashness would be executed. I shall leave nothing behind that I can
regret. My children are yet too young to attach me to existence, and
Heaven knows I have no close, no tender ties besides. Oh, pardon the
audacity of the thought.”
Then Lord Holland appeared and her whole life was altered. With such
an early career and with a temper so erratic one would hardly expect
that an irregular connection, even though legalized as soon as possible
by divorce and marriage, would turn out well. It did. When she first
meets her lover, he is “quite delightful.” A number of years later she
recognizes that life with him has transformed her character. Every hour
she continues “to wonder [sic] and admire the most wonderful union of
benevolence, sense, and integrity in the character of the excellent being
whose faith is pledged with mine. Either he has imparted some of his
goodness to me, or the example of his excellence has drawn out the latent
good I had—as certainly I am a better person and a more useful member of
society than I was in my years of misery.”
Although she was still young and very beautiful, the ardent suit of other
lovers makes no impression on her. She gets rid of them as best she can
and consults her husband as to the most effective manner of doing so.
Formerly life was hateful and she longed to be rid of it. “In the
bitterness of sorrow I prayed for death. Now I am a coward indeed; a
spasm terrifies me, and every memento of the fragile tenure of my bliss
strikes a panic through my frame. Oh! my beloved friend, how hast thou
by becoming mine endeared the every day occurrences of life! I shrink
from nothing but the dread of leaving or of losing thee.” In the lot of
an acquaintance who has lost her husband she bewails the most terrible
of future possibilities for herself. “How fortunate for her should she
never awaken to her wretchedness, but die in the agonies of delirium. Oh!
in mercy let such be my close if I am doomed to the—oh! I cannot with
calmness suppose the case.”
It is in no cynical spirit, nor with any question of the genuineness of
these feelings, but simply as a comment on the ways of this world, that I
turn to a passage of Greville, written three months after Lord Holland’s
death: “I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is exactly
the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland, who
seems to be pretty well forgotten. The same talk went merrily round, the
laugh rang loudly and frequently, and, but for the black and the mob-cap
of the lady, one might have fancied he had never lived or had died half a
century ago.”
There has been some question as to whether Lady Holland cared very much
for her children by either marriage. Certainly at her death she left
her son only two thousand pounds and a large income to a comparative
stranger. Yet at the time of her separation from her first husband she
sought passionately to retain her daughter, even resorting to the strange
and characteristic device of pretending that the child was dead and
burying a kid in a coffin in her place.
The Journal, too, is full of passages that come straight from the heart
and absolutely prove a sincere, if somewhat erratic maternal affection.
I hardly know a stranger mixture of passionate grief and curious
self-analysis than the following passage, written on occasion of a
child’s death. “There is a sensation in a mother’s breast at the loss
of an infant that partakes of the feeling of instinct. It is a species
of savage despair. Alas! to lose my pretty infant, just beginning to
prattle his little innocent wishes, and imagination so busily aids my
grief by tracing what he might have been. In those dreary nights whilst
I sat watching his disturbed sleep, I knelt down and poured out to God
a fervent prayer for his recovery, and swore that if he were spared me
the remainder of my life should be devoted to the exercise of religious
duties; that I would believe in the mercy of a God who could listen to
and alleviate my woe. Had he lived I should have been a pious enthusiast.
I have no superstition in my nature, but from what I then felt it is
obvious how the mind may be worked upon when weakened and perplexed by
contending passions of fear, hope, and terror.”
It is admitted that Lady Holland was an able housekeeper, and Mr. Ellis
Roberts even thinks that the success of her salon was largely owing to
the excellence of her table. “It is true the parties were overcrowded,
but ... men do not much care how they eat, if what they eat is to their
liking.” It is admitted, also, that she was most generous, kind, and
thoughtful for her servants. Yet the inveterate prejudice against her
manifests itself even here. “In this,” says Greville, “probably selfish
considerations principally moved her; it was essential to her comfort to
be diligently and zealously served, and she secured by her conduct to
them their devoted attachment. It used often to be said in joke that they
were very much better off than her guests.” Nevertheless, perhaps there
are worse tests of character than the devoted attachment of servants.
On Lady Holland’s intellectual and spiritual life much curious light
is thrown by her Journal, when taken in connection with the comments
of her friends. Her wayward childhood, her early marriage, her utter
lack of systematic education must not be forgotten. “I should be _bien
autre chose_ if I had been regularly taught. I never had any method
in my pursuits, and I was always too greedy to follow a thing with any
_suite_. Till lately [age 26] I did not know the common principles of
grammar, and still a boy of ten years old would outdo me.” Yet she was a
wide, curious, and intelligent reader, and remembered what she read, as
when she located one of Moore’s innumerable stories in an old volume of
Fabliaux.
She had her strong opinion on most general subjects. In art she was
distinctly of the eighteenth century, as in her view of Wordsworth’s
poetry, and her admiration for Guido and the Bolognese painters. “‘St.
Peter weeping,’ by _Guido_, reckoned the first of his works and the most
faultless picture in Italy.” Nature sometimes moved her deeply, however,
as became a contemporary of Byron and Chateaubriand: “The weather was
delicious, truly Italian, the night serene, with just enough air to waft
the fragrance of the orange-flower, then in blossom. Through the leaves
of the trees we caught glimpses of the trembling moonbeams on the glassy
surface of the bay; all objects conspired to soothe my mind and the
sensations I felt were those of ecstatic rapture. I was so happy that
when I reached my bedroom, I dismissed my maid, and sat up the whole
night looking from my window upon the sea.”
In religion she was more than liberal, in fact, had no positive beliefs.
“Oh, God! chance, nature, or whatever thou art,” is the best she can do
in the way of a prayer, though she never encouraged sceptical talk at her
table and sometimes snubbed Allen sharply for it. With irreligion went a
strong touch of superstition, as so often. “She would not set out on a
journey of a Friday for any consideration; dreadfully afraid of thunder,
etc.,” “was frightened out of her wits by hearing a dog howl. She was
sure that this portended her death, or my lord’s.”
According to her critical guests she was pitifully afraid of death
always. “She was in a terrible taking about the cholera,” writes
Macaulay; “talked of nothing else; refused to eat any ice, because
somebody said that ice was bad for the cholera.” And again, in regard to
the same disease: “Lady Holland apparently considers the case so serious
that she has taken her conscience out of Allen’s keeping and put it
into the hands of Charles Grant.” At any rate, she was morbidly, almost
ludicrously anxious about her health; and she herself records that in
Spain she selfishly refused to let Allen leave her when she was very ill
to attend another invalid friend who greatly needed him. Yet in view of
many other passages in her Journal, I cannot think that she really lacked
courage in the face of death or of anything else. With her it is never
possible to tell what is serious and what is whim. Certain it is that
her parting scene was dignified, if not even noble: “She evinced during
her illness a very philosophical calmness and resolution, and perfect
good-humor, aware that she was dying, and not afraid of death.”
In her main interest, she was preëminently a social being. Greville says
that she dreaded solitude above everything, that she “could not live
alone for a single minute; she never was alone, and even in her moments
of greatest grief it was not in solitude but in society that she sought
her consolation.” Her Journal is, I think, sufficient to prove that this
is exaggerated. She read and loved to read, and no true lover of books
hates solitude. Still she was social, loved men and women and their talk
and laughter, loved the sparkle of wit, the snap of repartee, the long
interchange of solid argument. Nor was she too particular in the choice
of her associates. “There was no person of any position in the world, no
matter how frivolous and foolish, whose acquaintance she was not eager to
cultivate,” says Greville again. Here, too, her Journal supplies a needed
correction, or at least sets things in a fairer and more agreeable light:
“A long acquaintance is with me a passport to affection. This does not
operate to exclusion of new acquaintances, as I seek them with avidity.”
The “passport to affection” is generally recognized. She was loyal in her
affections and in her admirations, though sometimes carrying them, like
everything else, to the point of oddity, as in her strange worship of
Napoleon.
That a person so fond of society should have shown so little tact in it
is one of the curious features of her case. But some things throw an
interesting light on her brusqueness, her downright rudeness. Here is one
brief passage about a woman she met and liked. “If I were to see much of
her she might perhaps be benefited, for as nobody can do more mischief
to a woman than a woman, so perhaps might one reverse the maxim and say
nobody can do more good. A little mild reproof and disapprobation of
some of her doctrines might possibly rescue her from the gulf.” Does not
that explain a host of oddities, and pleasantly? Who of us likes to be
rescued from the gulf by a little mild reproof?
And the woman was nervous, sensitive, imaginative. Society irritates
such people even when it fascinates them. Of one guest she writes: “His
loud voice and disgusting vanity displeased me so much that I fled
for refuge speedily into my own room.” Another bit of most delicate
analysis shows how easily the social disillusionment of a sensitive
organization might manifest itself in tactless ill-humor. “There is some
perverse quality in the mind that seems to take an active pleasure in
destroying the amusement it promises to itself. It never fails to baffle
my expectations; so sure as I propose to my imagination an agreeable
conversation with a person where past experience warrants the hope, so
sure am I disappointed. I feel it perpetually, for example, with Dumont;
with him I have passed very many cheerful hours. This knowledge tempts
me to renew our walks, the consequence is we both yawn.” So clear, so
sure is it, that in all human relations the true road to happiness and
enjoyment is not to seek them directly for one’s self.
The sense of power, of guiding and controlling others, was doubtless a
large element of Lady Holland’s social instinct. “Her love and habit
of domination were both unbounded,” writes Greville. To achieve this,
to govern the sort of men that gathered about her, she knew that she
must study their pursuits. Hence she devoted herself to the details of
politics almost as sedulously as did Greville himself. The minuteness of
her Spanish Journals, personally of little importance, in this respect,
is remarkable. Yet I know of few things more delightfully feminine than
her brief comment on ministerial changes. Her friends go out of power,
and she observes, “The loss of all interest in public affairs was the
natural effect of the change of Administration to me.”
It is, I hope, by this time evident, that, whatever her virtues or her
defects, Lady Holland was an extraordinarily interesting character. I
have quoted from her guests and friends much that was bitter. But a
careful search brings out also testimony all the more favorable when
we consider the extent of the abuse. Thus Greville admits that “though
often capricious and impertinent, she was never out of temper, and bore
with good-humor and calmness the indignant and resentful outbreaks
which she sometimes provoked in others.” And while asserting that “She
was always intensely selfish,” he adds in the next sentence that “To
those who were ill and suffering, to whom she could show any personal
kindness and attention, among her intimate friends, she never failed
to do so.” Sydney Smith writes to her with a tenderness, an obviously
genuine affection, which would prove fine qualities in any woman: “I am
not always confident of your friendship for me at particular times; but
I have great confidence in it from one end of the year to the other:
above all, I am confident that I have a great affection for you.” “I
have heard five hundred people assert that there is no such agreeable
house in Europe as Holland House: why should you be the last person
to be convinced of this and the first to make it true?” “I love the
Hollands so much that I would go to them in any spot, however innocent,
sequestered and rural.” Finally, the most sympathetic, as well as one of
the shrewdest judgments, comes from Sir Henry Holland, the physician, who
had studied Lady Holland in all her aspects perhaps as carefully as any
one. “In my long and intimate knowledge of Lady Holland, I never knew her
to desert an old friend, whatever his condition might be. Many things
seemingly wilful and incongruous in her might be explained through this
happier quality of mind blended with that love of power, which, fostered
by various circumstances, pervaded every part of her life.... Her manner
of conversation at the dinner-table—sometimes arbitrary and in rude
arrest of others, sometimes courteously inviting the subject—furnished
a study in itself. Every guest felt her presence, and generally more or
less succumbed to it. She was acute in distinguishing between real and
false merit, and merciless in her treatment of the latter. Not a woman of
wit in words, she had what might well be called consummate wit in all her
relations to society. Once only, and that very late in life, she spoke to
me of the labor she underwent in maintaining the position thus acquired.”
May we not accept Greville’s dictum that she was a very strange woman,
adding that, after all, she played her rôle of a great lady in not
unseemly fashion? And perhaps it was with some justice that on her
deathbed she spoke—most characteristically—of her life “with considerable
satisfaction, asserting that she had done as much good and as little harm
as she could during her existence.”
III
MISS AUSTEN
CHRONOLOGY
Jane Austen.
Born December 16, 1775.
Wrote “Pride and Prejudice,” 1796-1797.
“Sense and Sensibility,” published 1811.
“Pride and Prejudice,” published 1813.
“Mansfield Park,” published 1814.
“Emma,” published 1816.
Died July 18, 1817.
“Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” published 1818.
[Illustration: _Jane Austen_]
III
MISS AUSTEN
Jane Austen lived her brief life in two or three quiet English towns.
She had no adventures, no experiences, no great fortunes or misfortunes.
She began to do her best writing when she was little more than a girl.
She left a few immortal works, surpassed by no others in the painting of
the human heart. What sort of woman was she herself? Not very remarkable
to look at, it appears. Round, full cheeks—“for the most part, they are
foolish that are so,” Cleopatra tells us—bright, hazel eyes, brown curls
about her face. No doubt, in every point a lady. But her soul?
At first sight, it seems that she laughed, mocked, at all things, very
gently and decorously, but still mocked. “I dearly love a laugh,” says
the heroine who surely most resembles her creatress. And again it is said
of this same Elizabeth Bennett: “She had a lively, playful disposition
which delighted in anything ridiculous.”
Those who love Miss Austen best will recognize, far beyond any testimony
of quoted instances, this incessant, pervading spirit of gentle mockery
which appears in all her books, courteous, infinitely well-bred, but
sometimes very far from amiable.
That she should mock at woman’s education was, perhaps, at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, natural enough. But it would be hard to
find any one in any century who has mocked at it more cruelly. “Where
people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a
well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the
vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A
woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should
conceal it as well as she can.” Which was also the opinion of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, considered one of the most learned women of her time.
Now we have changed all that.