She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal household.
She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings descending in
couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She had,
surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself dusting the
miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her crochet fall
from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world had need of
crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could reach,
gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing themselves in
little woods designed to shed the shade without the severity of forests;
she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the prospect,
and returning a different way from the way it went. And what was her
verdict? “A lunatic asylum.”
It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had
she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to
point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.
My mother never failed to point out the folly of work-women, shop-girls,
and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed
to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.
What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her
advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a
grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did
nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her fingers?
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is
misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of
congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of
his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in
one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known,
euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole’s mother was a Miss
Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present
volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the actress, and, to
her credit, Lady Dorothy was “exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she
was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather to a
bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars she saw people walking at
large, and once or twice she made a surprising little flight into the
open air. A gayer, brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe
can seldom have existed; so that one is forced at times to ask whether
what we call living in a cage is not the fate that wise people,
condemned to a single sojourn upon earth, would choose. To be at large
is, after all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulating the
money to buy and the time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find
clustering and glowing about their cradles when their eyes first
open—as hers opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square.
Horace Walpole had lived there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away
in one night’s play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in
Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees
in the garden, and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a
more charming and even romantic environment in which to set the story of
two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with
their governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the
tenantry on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of
the following letter among one’s ancestors would have been a source of
inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which
had invited Lord Orford to become its president:
I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken to
the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never distributed
religious tracts. All this was known to you and your Society.
Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your president.
God forgive your hypocrisy.
It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But, alas!
Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire,
and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mulberry tree, and
later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first glimpse of the bars.
We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes in
general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to look at; but when it
comes to calling people “vandals” who cut them down to build houses, and
to having footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon those
footstools inscriptions which testify that “often and often has King
George III. taken his tea” under this very footstool, then we want to
protest—“Surely you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent
remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean
Shakespeare. She “warmly appreciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used
to complain “that the county families were too stupid to appreciate his
genius at its proper worth”. George the Third drinking his tea; the
county families failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is
undoubtedly behind the bars.
Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive
hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of
Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made
a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with “the great
naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them, remarked with
apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who moved much in
London society were fond of being tossed in blankets. “I am afraid,” her
letter ended, “we should hardly be able to offer you anything of that
sort.” Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy in a
blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or whether Mrs. Darwin
obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity between her husband and
the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense of two
worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin world that emerges in
fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to
perch, picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, indulging in
exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpening her beak against a lump of
sugar in a large, airy, magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was
full of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been
macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the
breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost
threatened Australia with a plague of them, and “actually succeeded in
obtaining enough silk to make a dress”; again she was the first to
discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense,
into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and
established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported
rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce
storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china;
emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of
pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an aerial orchestra” when
they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit
of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy
was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at
luncheon in Charles Street.
But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into
what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned
with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and
amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that
they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and
wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a
flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to
the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how
well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to
spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was
going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame
partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?”
she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is
indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars.” But to our thinking
her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in
the Victoria and Albert Museum:
I do so agree with you, she wrote—though I ought not to say so—that
the upper class are very—I don’t know what to say—but they seem to
take no interest in anything—but golfing, etc. One day I was at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure
they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them—but
what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each
article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, giggling and
looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the higher class
visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them knowing of the place,
and for this we are spending millions—it is all too painful.
It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed ahead. That
catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off the head of a
pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the whole bird-cage
had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent screaming and
fluttering through the air, we can be sure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
told her, that her conduct would have been “a credit to the British
aristocracy”.