attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though China fell.
Her strange little activities, her needlework, her paperwork, her
collections, were the wonder of everybody, but she did not require
approval; she adopted them, in the light of day, for her own
amusement. She never pushed her peculiarities on the notice of
visitors, but, at the same time, if discovered in the act of some
incredible industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in
Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her was
the oddity of the students' life; she expatiated to me on their
beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of late years, I
was exhorted to send her picture post-cards from out-of-the-way
places, and "Remember that I like vulgar ones best," she added
imperturbably. The story is perhaps known to you of how, in a
circle of superfine ladies, the conversation turned to food, and
the company outdid one another in protestations of delicacy. This
one could only touch a little fruit, and that one was practically
confined to a cup of tea. Lady Dorothy, who had remained silent and
detached, was appealed to as to her opinion. In a sort of loud
cackling--a voice she sometimes surprisingly adopted--she replied,
"Oh, give me a blow-out of tripe and onions!" to the confusion of
the _precieuses_. She had a wholesome respect for food, quite
orthodox and old-fashioned, although I think she ate rather
markedly little. But she liked that little good. She wrote to me
once from Cannes, "This is not an intellectual place, but then the
body rejoices in the cooking, and thanks God for that." She liked
to experiment in foods, and her guests sometimes underwent strange
surprises. One day she persuaded old Lord Wharncliffe, who was a
great friend of hers, to send her a basket of guinea-pig, and she
entertained a very distinguished company on a fricassee of this
unusual game. She refused to say what the dish was until every one
had heartily partaken, and then Mr. George Russell turned suddenly
pale and fled from the room. "Nothing but fancy," remarked the
hostess, composedly. When several years ago there was a proposal
that we should feed upon horse-flesh, and a purveyor of that dainty
opened a shop in Mayfair, Lady Dorothy was one of the first of his
customers. She sallied forth in person, followed by a footman with
a basket, and bought a joint in the presence of a jeering populace.
She had complete courage and absolute tolerance. Sometimes she
pretended to be timid or fanatical, but that was only her fun. Her
toleration and courage would have given her a foremost place among
philanthropists or social reformers, if her tendencies had been
humanitarian. She might have been another Elizabeth Fry, another
Florence Nightingale. But she had no impulse whatever towards
active benevolence, nor any interest in masses of men and women.
And, above all, she was not an actor, but a spectator in life, and
she evaded, often with droll agility, all the efforts which people
made to drag her into propagandas of various kinds. She listened to
what they had to say, and she begged for the particulars of
specially awful examples of the abuses they set out to remedy. She
was all sympathy and interest, and the propagandist started with
this glittering ally in tow; but he turned, and where was she? She
had slipped off, and was in contemplation of some other scheme of
experience.
She described her life to me, in 1901, as a "treadmill of
friendship, perpetually on the go"; and later she wrote: "I am
hampered by perpetual outbursts of hospitality in every shape."
Life was a spectacle to her, and society a congeries of little
_guignols_, at all of which she would fain be seated, in a front
stall. If she complained that hospitality "hampered" her, it was
not that it interfered with any occupation or duty, but simply that
she could not eat luncheon at three different houses at once. I
remember being greatly amused when I congratulated her on having
enjoyed some eminent public funeral, by her replying, grudgingly:
"Yes--but I lost another most interesting ceremony through its
being at the same hour." She grumbled: "People are tugging me to
go and see things," not from any shyness of the hermit or
reluctance to leave her home, but simply because she would gladly
have yielded to them all. "Such a nuisance one can't be in two
places at once, like a bird!" she remarked to me.
In this relation, her attitude to country life was droll. After
long indulgence in her amazing social energy in London, she would
suddenly become tired. The phenomenon never ceased to surprise her;
she could not recollect that she had been tired before, and this
must be the end of all things. She would fly to the country; to
Dorsetshire, to Norfolk, to Haslemere, to what she called "the
soberness of Ascot." Then would come letters describing the bliss
of rural calm. "Here I am! Just in time to save my life. For the
future, no clothes and early hours." That lasted a very short
while. Then a letter signed "Your recluse, D.N.," would show the
dawn of a return to nature. Then _boutades_ of increasing vehemence
would mark the rising impatience. Sept 12: "How dreadful it is that
the country is so full of ladies." Sept. 15: "I am surrounded by
tall women and short women, all very tiresome." Sept. 20: "So dull
here, except for one pleasant episode of a drunken housemaid."
Sept. 23: "Oh! I am so longing for the flesh-pots of dear dirty old
London"; and then one knew that her return to Charles Street would
not be long delayed. She was very fond indeed of country life, for
a short time, and she was interested in gardens, but she really
preferred streets. "Eridge is such a paradise--especially the
quadrupeds," she once wrote to me from a house in which she found
peculiar happiness. But she liked bipeds best.
However one may postpone the question, sooner or later it is
necessary to consider the quality of Lady Dorothy Nevill's wit,
since all things converge in her to that. But her wit is so
difficult to define that it is not surprising that one avoids, as
long as possible, coming actually to grips with it. We may lay the
foundation of a formula, perhaps, by saying that it was a compound
of solid good sense and an almost reckless whimsicality of speech.
The curious thing about it was that it was not markedly
intellectual, and still less literary. It had not the finish of
such wit as is preserved in anthologies of humour. Every one who
enjoyed the conversation of Lady Dorothy must have perceived with
annoyance how little he could take away with him. Her phrases did
not often recur to please that inward ear, "which is the bliss of
solitude." What she said seemed at the time to be eminently right
and sane; it was exhilarating to a high degree; it was lighted up
by merriment, and piquancy, and salt; but it was the result of a
kind of magic which needed the wand of the magician; it could not
be reproduced by an imitator. It is very unfortunate, but the fact
has to be faced. When we tell our grandchildren that Lady Dorothy
Nevill was the finest female wit of her age, they will ask us for
examples of her talent, and we shall have very few to give.
She liked to discuss people better than books or politics or
principles, although she never shrank from these. But it was what
she said about human beings that kept her interlocutors hanging on
her lips. She made extraordinarily searching strictures on persons,
without malice, but without nonsense of any kind. Her own
favourites were treated with reserve in this respect: it was as
though they were put in a pen by themselves, not to be criticised
so long as they remained in favour; and she was not capricious,
was, on the contrary, conspicuously loyal. But they always had the
impression that it was only by special licence that they escaped
the criticism that every one else was subjected to. Lady Dorothy
Nevill was a stringent observer, and no respecter of persons. She
carried a bow, and shot at folly as it flew. But I particularly
wish to insist on the fact that her arrows, though they were
feathered, were not poisoned.
Light was thrown on the nature of Lady Dorothy's wit by her
correspondence. She could in no accepted sense be called a good
letter-writer, although every now and then brilliantly amusing
phrases occurred in her letters. I doubt whether she ever wrote one
complete epistle; her correspondence consisted of tumultuous,
reckless, sometimes extremely confused and incorrect notes, which,
however, repeated--for those who knew how to interpret her
language--the characteristics of her talk. She took no pains with
her letters, and was under no illusion about their epistolary
value. In fact, she was far too conscious of their lack of form,
and would sign them, "Your incompetent old friend"; there was
generally some apology for "this ill-written nonsense," or "what
stuff this is, not worth your reading!" She once wrote to me: "I
should like to tell you all about it, but alas! old Horace
Walpole's talent has not descended on me." Unfortunately, that was
true; so far as literary expression and the construction of
sentences went, it had not. Her correspondence could never be given
to the world, because it would need to be so much revised and
expanded and smoothed out that it would no longer be hers at all.
Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to receive,
because they gave the person to whom they were addressed a
reflection of the writer's mood at the moment. They were ardent and
personal, in their torrent of broken sentences, initials, mis-spelt
names and nouns that had dropped their verbs. They were not so good
as her talk, but they were like enough to it to be highly
stimulating and entertaining; and in the course of them phrases
would be struck out, like sparks from flint, which were nearly as
good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to say.
She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely coloured
paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet and green and grey,
paper that was stamped with patterns like a napkin, or frilled like
a lace handkerchief, or embossed with forget-me-nots like a child's
valentine. She had tricks of time-saving; always put "I" for "one,"
and "x" for "cross," a word which she, who was never cross, loved
to use. "I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to live in
a storm of x questions and crooked answers," she would write, or "I
am afraid my last letter was rather x."
Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious reverence
for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she "se moquait de
l'orthographie comme une chose meprisable." The spelling in her
tumultuous notes threw a light upon that of very fine ladies in the
seventeenth century. She made no effort to be exact, and much of
her correspondence was made obscure by initials, which she expected
her friends to interpret by divination. From a withering
denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts Mr. John Burns
and "that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom I like." From about 1899 to
1903, I think that Lord Wolseley was the friend who occupied most
of her thoughts. In her letters of those years the references to
him are incessant, but when he is not "the F.M." and "our C.C.,"
she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from
"Wollesley" to "Walsey." When she wrote to me of the pleasure she
had had in meeting "the Abbot Guaschet," it took me a moment to
recognise the author of _English Monastic Life_. She would laugh
herself at her spelling, and would rebut any one who teased her
about it by saying, "Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be
a bright specimen--like you!" When she made arrangements to come to
see me at the House of Lords, which she frequently did, she always
wrote it "the Lord's House," as though it were a conventicle.
One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds of her
notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast between the
general tone of them and the real disposition of their writer. Lady
Dorothy Nevill in person was placid, indulgent, and calm; she never
raised her voice, or challenged an opinion, or asserted her
individuality. She played, very consistently, her part of the
amused and attentive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her
letters she pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to
seem, passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with
humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget an
engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and this is how she
apologises:--
"To think that every hour since you said you would come I have
repeated to myself--Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then after all to
go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and swear on the
doorstep, and you will never come again now, really. No punishment
here or hereafter will be too much for me. Lead me to the Red Hill
Asylum, and leave me there."
This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was not less
vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me of an anonymous
letter which he once received, to which she afterwards pleaded
guilty. A cow used to be kept at the back of Lansdowne House, and
the animal, no doubt feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at
all sorts of hours. The letter, which was supposed to voice the
complaint of the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the
broadest Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript: "Dang
'un, there 'ee goes again!" As a matter of fact, her letters, about
which she had no species of vanity or self-consciousness, were to
her merely instruments of friendship. There was an odd mingling of
affection and stiffness in them. She marshalled her acquaintances
with them, and almost invariably they were concerned with
arrangements for meeting or explanations of absence. In my own
experience, I must add that she made an exception when her friends
were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them the
gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled with her
experiences as the neighbour of a famous African magnate, and with
the remark, "Mrs. ----," a London fine lady of repute, "has been
here, and has scraped the whole inside out of Mr. ----, and gone
her way rejoicing." Nor did she spare the correspondent himself:--
"Old Dr. ---- has been here, and tells me he admires you very much;
but I believe he has lost his memory, and he never had good taste
at any time."
This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its bosom. Of
a very notorious individual she wrote to me:--
"I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I had to wait
100 years, but everything is possible in the best of worlds, and he
was very satisfactory at last." Satisfactory! No word could be more
characteristic on the pen of Lady Dorothy. To be "satisfactory,"
whether you were the President of the French Republic or Lord
Wolseley or the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a
great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her
unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon by
Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be "satisfactory" if he
did his job thoroughly. The only entirely unsatisfactory people
were those who were insipid, conventional, and empty. "The first
principle of society should be to extinguish the bores," she once
said. I remember going with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being
struck with a remark which she made, not because it was important,
but because it was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves
which she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of
Indian cow. "What a bore for the wolves to have to live opposite a
cow!" and then, as if talking to herself, "I do hate a ruminant!"
Her relations to literature, art, and science were spectacular
also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, always on the
side of those things against the Philistines, but not affecting
special knowledge herself. She was something of a virtuoso. She
once said, "I have a passion for reading, but on subjects which
nobody else will touch," and this indicated the independence of her
mind. She read to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for
experience. When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of
producing the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It
was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was then an
object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English reader. Lady
Dorothy had already read _L'Assommoir_, and had not shrunk from it;
so I ventured to tell her of _La Terre_, which was just appearing.
She wrote to me about it: "I have been reading Zola. He takes the
varnish off rural life, I must say. Oh! these horrid demons of
Frenchmen know how to write. Even the most disgusting things they
know how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe
Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of the
inhabitants in their cups." She told me later--for we followed our
Zola to _Lourdes_ and _Paris_--that some young Oxford prig saw _La
Bete Humaine_ lying on the table at Charles Street, and remarked
that Lady Dorothy could surely not be aware that that was "no book
for a lady." She said, "I told him it was just the book for me!"
She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, with a
renewal of sentiment. "I am dedicating my leisure hours to
_Endymion_. What a charm after the beef and mutton of ordinary
novels!" She gradually developed a cult for Swinburne, whom she had
once scorned; in her repentance after his death, she wrote: "I
never hear enough about that genius Swinburne! My heart warms when
I think of him and read his poems." I think she was very much
annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles Street. When
Verlaine was in England, to deliver a lecture, in 1894, Lady
Dorothy was insistent that, as I was seeing him frequently, I
should bring the author of _Parallelement_ to visit her. She
said--I think under some illusion--"Verlaine is one of my pet
poets, though," she added, "not of this world." I was obliged to
tell her that neither Verlaine's clothes, nor his person, nor his
habits, admitted of his being presented in Mayfair, and that,
indeed, it was difficult to find a little French eating-house in
Soho where he could be at home. She then said: "Why can't you take
me to see him in this eating-house?" I had to explain that of the
alternatives that was really the least possible. She was not
pleased.
Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the features of
our wonderful fairy friend. However I may sharpen the pencil, the
line it makes is still too heavy. I feel that these anecdotes seem
to belie her exquisite refinement, the rapidity and delicacy of her
mental movement. To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth.
Above all, it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her
emotional nature. Lady Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of
gravity nor of pathos; she was totally devoid of sentimentality.
This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse to believe
that the author of so many pungent observations and such apparently
volatile cynicism had a heart. When this was once questioned in
company, one who knew her well replied: "Ah! yes, she has a heart,
and it is like a grain of mustard-seed!" But her kindliness was
shown, with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with
her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly correct to
say that she had the genius of friendship, because that supposes a
certain initiative and action which were foreign to Lady Dorothy's
habits. But she possessed, to a high degree, the genius of
comradeship. She held the reins very tightly, and she let no one
escape whom she wished to retain. She took immense pains to
preserve her friendships, and indeed became, dear creature, a
little bit tyrannical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively
emphatic. She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with "Oh, you
demon!" or complain of "total and terrible neglect of an old
friend; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of your
misdeeds!" She was ingenious in reproach: "I cannot afford to waste
penny after penny, and no assets forthcoming," or "I have only two
correspondents, and one of them is a traitor; I therefore cease to
write to you for ever!" This might sound formidable, but it was
only one of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be
followed next day by the most placable of notelets.
Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevolences, which
often took somewhat the form of voyages of discovery. Among these
her weekly excursion to the London Hospital, in all weathers and in
every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess
that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately
prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at
the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some
gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost
equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way
which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the
"pore dear things" appreciated her listening smile and sympathetic
worldliness much more than they would have done the admonitions of
a more conscious philanthropist.
And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines forth.
She followed all that her friends did, everything that happened to
those who were close to them. She liked always to receive the
tribute of what she called my "literary efforts," and was
ruthlessly sharp in observing announcements of them: "Publishing
again, and of course no copy for poor old me," when not a volume
had yet left the binders. She took up absurd little phrases with
delightful _camaraderie_; I have forgotten why at one time she
took to signing herself "Your Koh-i-Noor," and wrote: "If I can
hope to be the Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse's party, I shall be sure to
come on Monday." One might go on indefinitely reviving these
memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality. But I close
on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure will affect you. She
had been a little tyrannical, as usual, and perhaps thought the
tone of her persiflage rather excessive; a few hours later came a
second note, which began: "You have made my life happier for me
these last years--you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred." From
her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form, and who
prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker, this was worth
all the protestations of some more ebullient being. And there, dear
Lady Burghclere, I must leave this poor sketch for such approval as
you can bring yourself to give it.
Very faithfully yours,
EDMUND GOSSE.
_January 1914._
II
LORD CROMER AS A MAN OF LETTERS
In the obituary notices which attended the death of Lord Cromer, it was
necessary and proper that almost the whole space at the command of the
writers should be taken up by a sketch of his magnificent work as an
administrator, or, as the cant phrase goes, "an empire-builder." For
thirty years, during which time he advanced to be one of the most
powerful and efficient of proconsuls, he held a place in the political
world which arrested the popular imagination, and must continue to
outweigh all other aspects of his character. Of this side of Lord
Cromer's splendid career I am not competent to say a word. But there
was another facet of it, one more private and individual, which became
prominent after his retirement, I mean his intellectual and literary
activity, which I had the privilege of observing. It would be a pity,
perhaps, to let this be wholly submerged, and I propose to give, from my
own recollection, some features of it. Lord Cromer was the author of six
or seven published volumes, but these are before the public, and it is
needless to speak much about them. What may be found more interesting
are a few impressions of his attitude towards books and towards ideas.