Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  vi

  There are other galleries, older and more austere than the Cartoon Gallery. They are not quite so long, they are narrower, lower, and darker, and not so exuberant in decoration; indeed, they are simply and soberly panelled in oak. They have the old, musty smell which, to me, wherever I met it, would bring back Knole. I suppose it is really the smell of all old houses, a mixture of woodwork, potpourri, leather, tapestry, and the little camphor bags which keep away the moths; the smell engendered by the shut windows of winter and the open windows of summer, with the breeze of summer blowing in from across the park. Bowls of lavender and dried rose-leaves stand on the window-sills; and if you stir them up you get the quintessence of the smell, a sort of dusty fragrance, sweeter in the underlayers where it has held the damp of the spices. The potpourri at Knole is always made from the recipe of a prim-looking little lady who lived there for many years as a guest in the reigns of George I and George II. Her rooms open out of one of the galleries, two of the smaller rooms in the house, the bedroom hung with a pale landscape of blue-green tapestry, the sitting-room panelled in oak; and in the bedroom stands her small but pompous bed, with bunches of ostrich-plumes nodding at each of the four corners. Strangers usually seem to like these two little rooms best, coming to them as they do, rather overawed by the splendour of the galleries; they are amused by the smallness of the four-poster, square as a box, its creamy lining so beautifully quilted; by the spinning-wheel, with the shuttle still full of old flax; and by the ring-box, containing a number of plain-cut stones, which could be exchanged at will into the single gold setting provided. The windows of these rooms, furthermore, look out on to the garden; they are human, habitable little rooms, reassuring after the pomp of the ball-room and the galleries. In the sitting-room there is a small portrait of the prim lady, Lady Betty Germain, sitting very stiff in a blue brocaded dress; she looks as though she had been a martinet in a tight, narrow way.

  The gallery leading to these rooms is called the Brown Gallery. It is well named: oak floor, oak walls, and barrelled ceiling, criss-crossed with oak slats in a pattern something like cat’s cradle. Some of the best pieces of the English furniture are ranged down each side of this gallery: portentously important chairs, Jacobean cross-legged or later love-seats in their original coverings, whether of plum and silver, or red brocade with heavy fringes, or green with silver fringes, or yellow silk sprigged in black, or powder-blue; and all have their attendant stool squatting beside them. They are lovely, silent rows, for ever holding out their arms, and for ever disappointed. At the end of this gallery is a tiny oratory, down two steps, for the use of the devout: this little secret place glows with colour like a jewel, but nobody ever notices it, and on the whole it probably prefers to hide itself away unobserved.

  There is also the Leicester Gallery, which preserves in its name the sole trace of Lord Leicester’s brief ownership of Knole. The Leicester Gallery is very dark and mysterious, furnished with red velvet Cromwellian farthingale chairs and sofas, dark as wine; there are illuminated scrolls of two family pedigrees—Sackville and Curzon—richly emblazoned with coats of arms, drawn out in 1589 and 1623 respectively; and in the end window there is a small stained-glass portrait of “Herbrand de Sackvilic, a Norman notable, came into England with William the Conqueror, A.D. 1066.” (Ilerbrandus de Sackville, Praepotens Normanus, intravit Angliam cum Gulielmo Conquestore, Anno Domini MLXVI.) There is also a curious portrait hanging on one of the doors, of Catherine Fitzgerald, Countess of Desmond, the portrait of a very old lady, in a black dress and a white ruff, with that strange far-away look in her pale eyes that comes with extreme age. Bernard Berenson, somewhat to my surprise, once told me that in his opinion it was by Rembrandt. Tradition says of her that she was born in the reign of Edward the Fourth and died in the reign of Charles the First, breaking her leg incidentally at the age of ninety by falling off a cherry tree; that is to say, she was a child when the princes were smothered in the Tower, a girl when Henry the Seventh came to the throne, and watched the pageant of all the Tudors and the accession of the Stuarts—the whole of English history enclosed between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. She must have been a truly legendary figure in the country by the time she had reached the age of a hundred and forty or thereabouts.

  It is rather a frightening portrait, that portrait of Lady Desmond. If you go into the gallery after nightfall with a candle the pale, far-away eyes stare past you into the dark corners of the wainscot, eyes either over-charged or empty—which? Knole is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle, as I used to do when I was little. There were no electric torches in those days. The light gleamed on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and started up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaked and sighed; the tapestry swayed, and the figures on it undulated and seemed to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep, might be inhabited, and you would not know what might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark. But I was never frightened at Knole. I loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved me.

  vii

  As there are three galleries among the state-rooms, so are there three principal bedrooms: the King’s, the Venetian Ambassador’s, and the Spangled Room. The so-called King’s Bedroom has long been a subject of dispute. Fanny Burney, writing to her sister Susanna in October 1779, remarks that one of the state-rooms had been fitted up by an “Earle of Dorsette for the bedchamber of King James I when upon a visit to Knowle [sic]; it had all the gloomy grandeur and solemn finery of that time.” Fanny Burney made a terrible muddle over the state-bedrooms at Knole, and is a most unreliable witness. It was she who originated the tradition perpetuated in my family that the King’s Bedroom was prepared for King James I. I used always meekly to repeat this legend, but in wiser and better-informed years have come to the conclusion that it is without foundation. For one thing, there is no mention of any visit to Knole in the detailed account of the Progresses of James I. This, in itself, although negative, would seem to be conclusive. Then, for the second thing, there is the further indisputable contention that the sumptuous character of the carving and upholstery suggests a later date, more like Charles II than James I. I fear, therefore, that the idea of James I ever laying his ugly head on those bumpily embroidered pillows, or being enclosed within those coral-coloured bed-curtains at night, must be forever discarded. I am sorry about this, because the immense bed with its canopy reaching almost to the ceiling, decked with ostrich feathers, the hangings stiff with gold and silver thread, the coverlet and the interior of the curtains heavily worked with a design of pomegranates and tiger-lilies, the royal cipher embossed on the pillows, should have been a bed for a King, even so unattractive and uninspiring a King as James I.

  I don’t know what else to say about the King’s Bedroom, otherwise sometimes called the Silver Room. I know it is very famous, but I have never liked it, and it is no good writing a book like this unless one states one’s own feelings and prejudices. I think it is the only vulgar room in the house. Not that the great bed is vulgar; that is magnificent in its way, and beautiful too. What is shockingly vulgar is the set of furniture made of embossed silver: the table, the hanging mirror, the tripods—all the florid and ostentatious product of the Restoration. Charles Sackville cannot have known when he had enough of a good thing. He did not have it all made for himself; the silver table, for instance, bears the initials in a monogram F.D.H.P. which can be interpreted as meaning Frances Dorset (Charles Sackville’s mother) and Henry Powle, her second husband. It has been suggested that the silver furniture at Knole was copied from similar sets made for Louis XIV at Versailles, all of which was melted down to meet some of the expense of the wars against England. If this is true, the set at Knole would thus be the only reproduction still in existence.

 
There is a lot more silver in the King’s Bedroom—there are silver sconces on the walls, ginger-jars, mirrors, fire-dogs, rose-water sprinklers, and a whole dressing-table set of hairbrushes and boxes, even to a little tiny eye-bath, all in silver. I often longed to brush my hair with what I wrongly supposed to be King James’ brushes, but having been strictly brought up not to touch anything in the show-rooms I didn’t dare.

  It is almost a relief to go from here to the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom. Green and gold; Burgundian tapestry, medieval figures walking in a garden; a rosy Persian rug—of all rooms I never saw a room that so had over it a bloom like the bloom on a bowl of grapes and figs. I cannot keep the simile, which may convey nothing to those who have not seen the room, out of my mind. Greens and pinks originally bright, now dusted and tarnished over. It is a very grave, stately room, rather melancholy in spite of its stateliness. It seems to miss its inhabitants more than do any of the other rooms. Perhaps this is because the bed appears to be designed for three: it is of enormous breadth, and there are three pillows in a row. Presumably this is what the Italians call a letto matrimoniale.

  viii

  In a remote corner of the house is the Chapel of the Archbishops, small, and very much bejewelled. Tapestry, oak, and stained-glass—the chapel smoulders with colour. It is greatly improved since the oak has been pickled and the mustard-yellow paint removed, also the painted myrtle-wreaths, tied with a gilt ribbon, in the centre of each panel, with which the nineteenth century adorned it, when it was considered “very simple, plain, and neat in its appearance, and well adapted for family worship.” The hand of the nineteenth century fell rather heavily on the chapel: besides painting the oak yellow and the ceiling blue with gold stars, it erected a Gothic screen and a yellow organ; but fortunately these are both at the entrance, and you can turn your back on them and look down the little nave to the altar where Mary Queen of Scots’ gifts stand under the perpendicular east window. All along the left-hand wall once hung the Gothic tapestry-scenes from the life of Christ, the figures, ungainly enough, trampling on an edging of tall irises and lilies exquisitely designed; and “Saint Luke in his first profession,” wrote Horace Walpole irreverently, “holding a urinal.” There used to be other tapestries in the house; there was one of the Seven Deadly Sins set, woven with gold threads, and there was another series, very early, representing the Flood and the two-by-two procession of the animals going into a weather-boarded Ark; but these, alas, had to be sold, and are now in America. So is the tapestry from the chapel, which now hangs in the [Fine Arts] Museum at Boston, Massachusetts.

  The chapel looks strange and lovely during a midnight thunderstorm: the lightning flashes through the stone ogives of the cast window, and one gets a queer effect, unreal like colour photography, of the colours lit up by that unfamiliar means. A flight of little private steps leads out of my old room straight into the family pew; so I dare to say that there are few aspects under which I have not seen the chapel; and as a child I used to “take sanctuary” there when I had been naughty: that is to say, fairly often. They never found me, sulking inside the pulpit. I used to think of John Donne, who sometimes preached there when he was Rector of Sevenoaks, reducing Lady Anne Clifford to tears.

  ix

  There would, of course, be many other aspects from which I might consider Knole; indeed, if I allowed myself full license I might ramble out over Kent and down into Sussex, to Lewes, Buckhurst, and Withyham, out into the fruit country and the hop country, across the Weald, over Saxonbury, and to Lewes among the Downs, and still I should not feet guilty of irrelevance. Of whatever English county I spoke, I still should be aware of the relationship between the English soil and that most English house. But more especially do I feel this concerning Kent and Sussex, and concerning the roads over which the Sackvilles travelled so constantly between estate and estate. The place-names in their letters recur through the centuries; the paper is a little yellower as the age increases, the ink a little more faded, the handwriting a little less easily decipherable, but still the gist is always the same: “I go to-morrow into Kent,” “I quit Buckhurst for Knole,” “my Lord rode to Lewes with a great company,” “we came to Knole by coach at midnight.” The whole district is littered with their associations, whether a village whose living lay in their gift, or a town where they endowed a college, or a wood where they hunted, or the village church where they had themselves buried. Sussex, in fact, was their cradle long before they came into Kent. Buckhurst, which they had owned since the twelfth century, was at one time an even larger house than Knole, and to their own vault in its parish church of Withybarn they were invariably brought to rest. Their trace is scattered over the two counties. But this was not my only meaning; I had in mind that Knole was no mere excrescence, no alien fabrication, no startling stranger seen between the beeches and the oaks. No other country but England could have produced it, and into no other country would it settle with such harmony and such quiet. The very trees have not been banished from the courtyards, but spread their green against the stone. From the top of a tower one looks down upon the acreage of roofs, and the effect is less that of a palace than of a jumbled village upon the hillside. It is not an incongruity like Blenheim or Chatsworth, foreign to the spirit of England. It is, rather, the greater relation of those small manor-houses which hide themselves away so innumerably among the counties, whether built of the grey stone of southwestern England, or the brick of East Anglia, or merely tile-hung or plastered like the cottages. It is not utterly different from any of these. The great Palladian houses of the eighteenth century are in England, they are not of England, as are these irregular roofs, this easy straying up the contours of the hill, these cool coloured walls, these calm gables, and dark windows mirroring the sun.

  Appendix 24

  I have to record with sorrow that Knole was given over to the National Trust in 1947. It was the only thing to do, and as a potential inheritor of Knole, I had to sign documents giving Knole away. It nearly broke my heart, putting my signature to what I couldn’t help regarding as a betrayal of all the tradition of my ancestors and the house I loved.

  I deeply respect and admire the National Trust and all that it does for the salvation of properties. I don’t know where we should be without it. I should, however, like to reprint an article I wrote in the Spectator which will perhaps reflect the feelings of many other people who have had to hand over their home because they were no longer able to afford to keep it up:

  In times when the esteem of beauty and the humanities hides like an unhonoured nymph from the eyes of men; times when expediency, convenience, and economy demand and hold our entire and sole consideration; times when pressure compels us to forget that “Beauty being the best of all we know. Sums up unsearchable and secret aims”; times when beauty and all that stands for culture make no more impact on men’s ears than the unreality of a dead language—in such times it comes as a plumb luxury to indulge even for a moment in the contemplation of something so very different, something so unnecessary, so inordinate, prodigal, extravagant, and traditional, as the great houses of the past. Of the past they are indeed, not only in century but in spirit; anachronisms both in time and in tenure. Yet in their growth they were organic, and in their creation they involved the completion of many a human life, the life of the craftsman who laboured, the stonemason, the carver, the carpenter, the builder of chimneys, and the life also of those who ordered and enjoyed, the obscure “Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeth, not one of whom has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have left this.”

  FROM COUNTRY NOTES (1940)

  Vita’s wide reading informs her best writing. The initial essay in Country Notes, “January,” begins with a reflection on Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet about the colors of the vowels, which she extends to the months of the year. January, she says, “is a large pewter plate stained with the reflection of a red sunset.” It i
s not a month in which enough happens for her: It is too stationary. “I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.” But, she continues, it is a perfect month for walking under the “bare trees, the wild, wet sky, even the car-ruts full of water, and the seagulls settling on the plough.… Damp and disheveled, January is the month for thick shoes, a dog at our heels, and the wind in our faces.”5 May, she observes in her essay on that month, when so much happens too quickly to be seized in words, is the exact opposite of this winter feeling and demands a totally different reaction, no less vivid.

  Vita’s personality and her life imbue every piece of her country writing, yet she leaves no impression of someone dwelling in a castle, writing in a tower: Here she feels as present as your next-door neighbor, who might just have come in from a walk, able to tell you exactly what she saw, felt, thought. Like a neighbor who might ruminate at length on “Gardens and Gardening,” she tells you how she took up gardening (as she did at 22), with a strip known as “Vita’s garden,” which she neither tended nor loved, or how she hates gadgets of all kinds and the names for them. A brief essay on gardeners follows later, relating how disconcerting she finds such people. In this book, as in most of Vita’s writings, there is a reflection on the land she loves: Kent; often it is “looking absurdly like itself,” and almost always it is quickly forgotten by the foreigner passing by in his train, although “we who live in Kent do not forget about it and have no wish to do so.”6

  Most of these essays were originally written for the New Statesman, a British periodical.

  COUNTRY NOTES

  A Country Life

  Living in the country as I do, I sometimes stop short to ask myself where the deepest pleasure is to be obtained from a rural life, so readily derided as dull by the urban-minded. When I stop short like this, it is usually because some of my metropolitan friends have arrived to ruffle my rustic peace with the reverberations of a wider world. They ask me if I have seen this or that play, these or those pictures, and always I find myself obliged to reply that I have not. This makes me appear, and feel, a boor. Then after this most salutary visit they drive off, back to London, and the peace and the darkness close down on me once more, leaving me slightly disturbed but on the whole with an insulting sense of calm superiority. They leave me feeling that I am getting more out of this short life than they for all their agitations, an attitude of mind which strikes me as intolerably self-righteous. How can I possibly justify it? Should I not believe that it is more important to concern oneself with the troubles and interests of the world, than to observe the first crocus in flower? More important to take an active part wherever one’s small activity would be most welcome, than to grow that crocus? How, then, to explain my backwater’s deep source of delight?