Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  And Earth some new convulsion tear,

  And us, to join, the World should all

  Be cramped into a planisphere.

  As lines so loves oblique may well

  Themselves in every angle greet

  But ours so truly parallel,

  Though infinite can never meet?

  or of this, where the beauty of the first two lines almost redeems the extravagance of the two following:

  How wide they dream! The Indian slaves

  That sink for pearl through seas profound,

  Would find her tears yet deeper waves

  And not of one the bottom sound?

  If we except Appleton House it is, generally speaking, noticeable that Marvell’s use of injudicious conceits occurs most frequently in poems which we may presume him to have written round a deliberate thesis—such poems as Eyes and Tears, The Match, and Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow. There are other poems which I am reluctant to include. Is On a drop of dew to be condemned? or The Coronet? or The Gallery? or The Fair Singer? or the Definition of Love, characteristic of the metaphysical school though it is, with its splendid opening?—

  My love is of a birth as rare

  As ‘tis for object strange and high:

  It was begotten of Despair

  Upon Impossibility.

  Surely not. Conscientiously though one may search through the pages of Marvell’s lyrics, the worst offences are not to be found in him. It is impossible to imagine Marvell writing such a set of verses as Cleveland’s Fuscara. Moreover, the true poet bursts out in the most unexpected places, as:

  Near this, a fountain’s liquid bell

  Tinkles within the concave shell.

  Might a soul bathe there and be clean,

  Or slake its drought?

  or—the shallower but still charming Marvell:

  Through every garden, every mead,

  I gather flowers; (my fruits are only flowers,)

  or, most unexpected of all, the “old honest countryman,” the garden-poet, suddenly interposing himself in the midst of an Horatian ode upon Cromwell:

  So when the falcon high

  Falls heavy from the sky,

  She, having killed, no more does search,

  But on the next green bough to perch.

  The poet in Marvell died hard, whether he tried to stifle that poet under the weight of fashion or under an absorption in public affairs. And this mention brings me to yet another aspect of Marvell, which must not be forgotten.

  We have considered him as a nature poet, as a pastoral poet, and as a poet of the school of wit; to consider him as a satirist lies outside the scheme of this essay, but there is a group of poems which straddles across the frontier between lyricism and politics. This group includes the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland, The First Anniversary of the government under O. C. and The Poem upon the death of O. C. The Horatian ode is almost too well known to admit of quotation, but it throws so revealing a light upon Marvell’s eminently reasonable and impartial attitude about public events that a few excerpts may be allowed. I have already quoted a passage from the Rehearsal Transprosed in defence of Marvell’s alleged political inconsistency; the Horatian ode will bear out the opinions expressed therein, not so much in the famous lines upon the execution of Charles I,

  He nothing common did or mean

  Upon that memorable scene:

  But with his keener eye

  The axe’s edge did try,

  Nor called the gods with vulgar spite

  To vindicate his helpless right,

  But bow’d his comely head

  Down, as upon a bed,

  as in these four significant lines:

  Though Justice against Fate complain,

  And plead the ancient rights in vain:

  But these do hold or break

  As men are strong or weak,

  a fatalistic creed which foreshadows his later words: “Men may spare their pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go faster for our driving.” The time was ripe for Cromwell, and, though Marvell did not approve of civil war, and thought on the whole that men “ought to have trusted the King,” he recognized that according to the laws of nature the weak man must be broken by the strong,

  For to be Cromwell was a greater thing

  Then aught below or yet above a King.

  But what has he to say of Cromwell himself since our concern here is less with Marvell’s political convictions than with his vision as a man and a poet. The poem upon the death of Cromwell opens with an account of Cromwell’s affection for his daughter and grief at her death, all in conventional strain; but the poet in Marvell, as has been said, was liable to burst the conventional fetters:

  “All, all is gone,”

  he exclaims suddenly,

  “All, all is gone of ours or his delight

  In horses fierce, wild deer, or armour bright,”

  and from convention the poem swings to actual experience and interpretation:

  I saw him dead. A leaden slumber lies

  And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes,

  Those gentle rays under the lids were fled

  Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;

  That port which so majestic was and strong,

  Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along,

  All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan,

  How much another thing, no more that man?

  Oh, human glory, vain; oh, death, oh, wings,

  Oh, worthless world; oh transitory things!…

  Saw Marvell Cromwell dead? Saw Milton Marvell ever? Poetry is a cynically lying jade, and her evidence is of no account.

  A NOTE ON THIEVES’ CANT (1947)

  Vita’s fascinations extended to philology, as witnessed by this piece on the differentiation between cant, the “tight and correct” opposite of the “loose, expressive, and metaphorical” slang that creeps into language. Specialists of the medieval French poet François Villon have made a study of the thieves’ cant he uses, but it is not exactly a common focus of study. I include Vita’s piece, found so strangely placed as an appendix to the 1947 edition of Knole and the Sackvilles, as a further demonstration—should one be needed—of her widespread curiosity for language as for learning of all sorts.

  … I think few people, apart from students of philology, realize the existence of that large section of our language in use among the vagabond classes. Cant and slang, to most people’s minds, are synonymous, but this is an error of belief: slang creeps from many sources into the river of language, and so mingles with it that in course of time many use it without knowing that they do so; cant, on the other hand, remains definite and obscure of origin. Slang is loose, expressive, and metaphorical; cant is tight and correct; it has even a literature of its own, broad and racy, incomprehensible to the ordinary reader without the help of a glossary. Its words, for the most part, bear no resemblance to English words; unlike slang, they are not words adapted, for the sake of vividness, to a use for which they were not originally intended, but are applied strictly to their peculiar meaning.

  Although the origin of cant as a separate jargon or language is obscure—it does not appear in England till the second half of the sixteenth century—the origin of certain of its words may be traced. Of those included in the vocabulary, for example, ken, for house, comes from khan (gipsy and Oriental); fogus, for tobacco, comes from fogo, an old word for stench; maund, or maunder, to beg, does not derive, as might be thought, from maung, to beg, a gipsy word taken from the Hindu, but from theAnglo-Saxon mand, a basket; bouse, to drink (which of course, has given us booze, with the same meaning, and which in the fourteenth century was perfectly good English), comes from the Dutch buyzen, to tipple. Abram, naked, is found as abrannoi, with the same meaning Hungarian gipsy; cassan, cheese, is cas in English gipsy; diniber survives for “pretty” in Worcestershire. Cheat appears frequently in catit as a common affix.

 
As for autem mort, I find it an early authority thus defined: “These autem morts be married women, as there be but a few. For autem in their language is a church, so she is a wife married at the church, and they be as chaste as a cow I have, that goeth to bull every moon, with what bull she careth not.

  PART VI

  HOUSE, GARDENING, AND NATURE

  Vita’s enlightened interest in specific place and landscape was matched by her equal interest in architecture and its history. Buildings of many sorts of locations elicited her enthusiasm, as did their history. She was no less eager to reflect on the ways in which the human imagination could shape from diverse materials in the natural world such an enormous variety of arrangements. Her knowledge seems endless on an endless variety of topics.

  The multiform intertwinings in the human construction of material both artificial and natural supplied her with a continual source for her poetry and prose. In her writing about these vast topics, we sense both pattern and passion.

  FROM KNOLE AND THE SACKVILLES (1922)

  Perhaps Vita’s most celebrated book, about history, house, and herself, concerns her dearly loved and hard-lost Knole. Her relation to her colorful ancestors infuses the book with nostalgia and beauty. Yes, she hated growing old, but the age of this house marks it as venerable, and her relation to it as no less so. Vita’s passion for and knowledge of architecture was founded on her love of her house at Knole (its construction ranged from King John to King James), well documented in this history of that “great Elizabethan pile”1 and its—and her—ancestry.

  There are further reflections on Knole and the adjacent property in her book English Country Houses. Knole House itself is illustrated in this small volume, and details of its construction and appearance abound. In her other descriptions, as in these, her writing feels lived, whether she is describing the black-and-white “startling and stripy” timber houses of thick beams placed in plaster of a pale coloring contrasting with the black beams, such as are found in Cheshire, or the brickwork of East Anglia, or then the buildings of Nicholas Hawksmoor. However, because of her personally intense connection to Knole, we are especially held by her description of it, the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury—the leader of the Anglican church—then a royal palace, later in its “fulfilment as the home of an English family in whose hands it has remained ever since 1586.” It feels organic, in spite of its five acres with its seven courtyards, gray and green, “quiet as a college; the garden paths suited to the pacings of scholars as well as of courtiers; its ‘stately and tempered medievalism lacks all taint of the nouveau riche.’” History speaks loudly from its Elizabethan and Jacobean interiors so richly decorated, with its long galleries and large fireplaces and big curtained bed (assigned to the King or the Venetian ambassador, or a poet or archbishop “or to Charles the Second spending a night there with Nell Gwyn”).2

  But it is in Knole and the Sackvilles, with its intricate and nostalgic recounting of the intimate connection between her adored house and her ancestors, that Vita’s impassioned and intense reflection has the feeling of an entire heritage to which she is entitled both completely understood and irretrievably lost. Her childhood memories and her adult’s comprehension mingle here, as nowhere else. This is the nostalgic and melancholy Vita, who may have lost her heritage, but who has earned our respect by the detailed and careful delineation of her lineage and its place.

  When, in 1957, Alvilde Lees-Milne visited Eddy Sackville-West, who was living in Ireland, Vita lamented: “Drip, drip, drip; and all so green, and Eddy mouldering away towards old age when Knole … coud be his—and he doesn’t want it, and I who would have given my soul for it.”3 Knole was taken over by the National Trust in 1947 and Vita wrote a new guidebook to the property at that time. Probably her last visit to the property was in 1958, when a letter to Harold expressed her continuing regret that the estate could not be hers. Vita opened Knole and the Sackvilles with a poem by Christopher Smart.

  KNOLE AND THE SACKVILLES

  The dome of Knole, by fame enrolled,

  The church of Canterbury,

  The hops, the beer, the cherries there,

  Would fill a noble story.

  Let Se’noaks vaunt the hospitable seat

  Of Knoll [sic] most ancient; awfully my Muse

  These social scenes of grandeur and delight,

  Of love and veneration let me tread.

  How oft beneath yon oak has am’rous Prior

  Awakened Echo with sweet Chloe’s name,

  While noble Sackville heard, hearing approv’d,

  Approving greatly recompens’d.

  —Christopher Smart

  CHAPTER I

  THE HOUSE

  i

  There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows best the vastness of its size; it looks like a medieval village. It is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak which is the clock-tower with its pointed roof: it might be the spire of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the medieval village. At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent, with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.

  ii

  The other side is the garden side—the gay, princely side, with flowers in the foreground; the grey walls rising straight up from the green turf; the mullioned windows, and the Tudor gables with the heraldic leopards sitting stiffly at each corner. The park side is the side for winter; the garden side the side for summer. It has an indescribable gaiety and courtliness. The grey of the Kentish rag [slates] is almost pearly in the sun, the occasional coral festoon of a climbing rose dashed against it; the long brown-red roofs are broken by the chimney stacks with their slim, peaceful threads of blue smoke mounting steadily upwards. One looks down upon the house from a certain corner in the garden. Here is a bench among a group of yews—dark, red-berried yews; and the house lies below, in the hollow, lovely in its colour and its serenity. It has all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable. Yet it is, as I have said, gay. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many owners and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of the roofs of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields. I make bold to say that it stoops to nothing either pretentious or meretricious. There is here no flourish of architecture, no ornament but the leopards, rigid and vigilant. The stranger may even think, upon arrival, that the front of the house is disappointing. It is, indeed, extremely modest. There is a gate-house flanked by two square grey towers, placed between two wings which provide only a monotony of windows and gables. It is true that two or three fine sycamores, symmetrical and circular as open umbrellas, redeem the severity of the front, and that a herd of fallow deer, browsing in the dappled shade of the trees, maintains the tradition of an English park. But, for the rest,
the front of the house is so severe as to be positively uninteresting; it is quiet and monkish; “a beautiful decent simplicity,” said Horace Walpole, “which charms one.” There is here to be found none of the splendour of Elizabethan building. A different impression, however, is in store when once the wicket-gate has been opened. You are in a courtyard of a size the frontage had never led you to expect, and the vista through a second gateway shows you the columns of a second court; your eye is caught by an oriel window opposite, and … by the clock tower which gives an oddly Chinese effect immediately above the Tudor oriel. Up till a few years ago Virginia creeper blazed scarlet in autumn on the walls of the Green Court, but it has now been torn away, and what may be lost in colour is compensated by the gain in seeing the grey stone and the slight moulding which runs, following the shape of the towers, across the house.

  On the whole, the quadrangle is reminiscent of Oxford, though more palatial and less studious. The house, built round a system of these courtyards: first this one, the Green Court, which is the largest and most magnificent; then the second one, or Stone Court, which is not turf like the Green Court, but wholly paved, and which has along one side of it a Jacobean colonnade; the third court is the Water Court, and has none of the display of the first two: it is smaller, and quite demure, indeed rather like some old house in Nuremberg, with the latticed window of one of the galleries running the whole length of it, and the friendly unconcern of an immense bay-tree growing against one of its walls. There are four other courts, making seven in all. This number is supposed to correspond to the days in the week; and in pursuance of this conceit there are in the house fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days. I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathize with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions, he could bring courts, stairs, and rooms up to that satisfactory total.