IF Lady Duff Gordon’s ‘Letters from the Cape’ are less familiar to the
present generation of readers than those of the Lady Anne Barnard, the
neglect is due in great part to the circumstances of their publication.
After appearing in a now-forgotten miscellany of Victorian travel,
Galton’s _Vacation Tourists_, third series (1864), where their simplicity
and delicate unprofessional candour gave them a brief hour of public
esteem, they were first issued separately as a supplement to Lady Duff
Gordon’s _Last Letters from Egypt_, occupying the latter portion of a
volume to which the writer’s daughter, Mrs. Ross, contributed a short but
vivid memoir, which touched but lightly on her South African experiences;
and they have never appeared, we believe, in any other form. Yet they
are inferior in nothing but political interest to those of the authoress
of ‘Auld Robin Gray’. Indeed, in her intellectual equipment, her
temperament, and her gift of style, Lady Duff Gordon was a far rarer
creature than the jovial and managing Scotswoman who was the
correspondent of Dundas. And in human sympathy—the quality that has kept
Lady Anne Barnard’s letters alive—Lady Duff Gordon shows a still wider
range and a yet keener sensibility. Her letters are the fine flower of
the English epistolary literature of the Cape. Few books of their class
have better deserved reprinting.
The daughter of John and Sarah Austin ran every risk of growing up a
blue-stocking. Yet she escaped every danger of the kind—the proximity of
Bentham, her childish friendships with Henry Reeve and the Mills, and the
formidable presence of the learned friends of both her parents—by the
force of a triumphant naturalness and humour which remained with her to
the end of her life. Although her schooling was in Germany and her
sympathy with German character was remarkable, her own personality was
rather French in its grace and gaiety. It was characteristic of her,
then, to defend as she did ‘la vieille gaieté française’ against Heine on
his death-bed. But the truth is that her sympathies were nearly perfect.
She was one of those rare characters that see the best in every
nationality without aping cosmopolitanism, simply because they are
content everywhere to be human. Convention and prejudice vex them as
little as pedantry can. Their clear eyes look out each morning on a
fresh world, and their experiences are a perpetual school of sympathy and
never the sad routine of disillusionment.
When Lady Duff Gordon came to the Cape in search of health in 1861, she
brought with her, young though she was, a wealth of recollection and
experience such as perhaps no other observer of South Africa has known.
She had been the friend of nearly every prominent man-of-letters from
Rogers to Tennyson. She was intimate with half the intellectual world of
England and Germany, and admired for her beauty and grace of character in
the salons of Paris as much as in the drawing-rooms of London. And she
had shown the quality of her womanly sympathy in the most famous of her
literary friendships, that with Heinrich Heine, when she visited the poet
and soothed him in his last sad days in Paris—an episode perhaps better
known to present-day readers from Mr. Zangwill’s story of _A Mattrass
Grave_ than in the moving narrative of Lady Duff Gordon herself, on which
the story is based.
It was into the little world of Caledon and Simonstown and Worcester,
drowsy, sun-steeped villages of the old colony—for Cape Town had little
attraction for her and the climate proved unsuitable—that this rare and
exquisite being descended. But the test of the true letter-writer, the
letter-writer of genius, is the skill and ease with which he brings
variety out of seeming monotony. The letters of Lady Duff Gordon answer
this test. She had not been many days in the country before she had
discovered (if she required to discover) the excellent principle: ‘Avoid
_engelsche hoogmoedigheid_ in dealing with the Dutch’; and by the time
she reaches Caledon she is on the best of terms with her new friends.
‘The postmaster, Heer Klein, and his old Pylades, Heer Ley, are great
cronies of mine’—she writes—‘stout old grey-beards, toddling down the
hill together. I sometimes go and sit on the stoep with the two old
bachelors and they take it as a great compliment; and Heer Klein gave me
my letters all decked with flowers, and wished “vrolyke tydings,
Mevrouw”, most heartily.’ She has a keen eye for the fine shades of
national character, and the modifications that spring from differences of
upbringing: the English farmer, ‘educated in Belgium’, the young Dutch
doctor with English manners, the German basket-maker’s wife in Cape Town.
A whole chapter might be written on her friendship with the Malays, whose
hearts she won as completely as she afterwards did those of their
Mohammedan brothers in Egypt. Mr. Ian Colvin has since opened up afresh
the field she was here almost the first to survey. In another direction,
in her remarks on the Eastern Province Jew of 1860, Lady Duff Gordon has
given us some notes which are of distinct value for social history. The
following passage, for example, deserves to be quoted as a ‘point de
repère’ in the evolution of a type. ‘These Colonial Jews’—says the
writer—‘are a new _Erscheinung_ to me. They have the features of their
race, but many of their peculiarities are gone. Mr. L—, who is very
handsome and gentlemanly, eats ham and patronises a good breed of pigs on
the “model farm” on which he spends his money. He is (he says) a
thorough Jew in faith, and evidently in charitable works; but he wants to
say his prayers in English and not to “dress himself up” in a veil and
phylacteries for the purpose; and he and his wife talk of England as
“home”, and care as much for Jerusalem as their neighbours. They have
not forgotten the old persecutions, and are civil to the coloured people,
and speak of them in quite a different tone from other English colonists.
Moreover, they are far better mannered and more ‘human’, in the German
sense of the word, in all respects; in short, less “colonial”.’ It was a
lady of this party who described Prince Albert’s funeral to Lady Duff
Gordon. ‘The people mourned for him’—she said—‘as much as for Hezekiah;
and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better.’
There is not much attempt to describe scenery in Lady Duff Gordon’s
Letters, but just enough to show that her eye was as sensitive to
landscape as to the shades of racial character and feeling. She
indicates delicately yet effectively the difference between the
atmosphere at the coast and that inland. ‘It is the difference between a
pretty pompadour beauty and a Greek statue. Those pale opal mountains as
distinct in every detail as the map on your table and so cheerful and
serene; no melodramatic effects of clouds and gloom.’ But, as a rule, it
is the human pageant that engrosses her, and here her sense of values is
extraordinarily keen. There is no better instance than the portrait of
the German basket-maker’s wife, who confided to the writer her timidity
on landing in Africa. ‘I had never—she said—been out of the city of
Berlin and knew nothing.’ She spoke of the natives as well-bred
(_anständig_), and Lady Duff Gordon’s comment is: ‘The use of the word
was characteristic. She could recognize an _Anständigkeit_ not of
Berlin.’ But one might quote from every second page of these letters.
Lady Duff Gordon was less than a year in South Africa; but in that time
she brought more happiness to those around her than many have done in a
lifetime. And her bounties live after her.
A last remark may not be out of place here, although it will doubtless
occur to every reader who approaches these letters with sympathy and
discretion. They must be read as true letters and the spontaneous
delineation of a personality, and not as a considered contribution to
South African history. Freer even than Stevenson himself from ‘le
romantisme des poitrinaires’, and singularly clear-sighted in all that
comes under her personal observation, Lady Duff Gordon does not wholly
escape the nemesis which overtakes the traveller who accepts his history
from hearsay. And in South Africa, as we know, such nemesis is well-nigh
unfailing. Few, however, have been the travellers, as the following
pages will show, who could meet such a charge with so great evidence of
candour, disinterestedness, and love of human nature in its simplest and
most innocent forms.