Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  In his office in the Strand, year in, year out, Thomas Coutts made his fortune by methods which will be plain enough to some readers and must remain a matter of mystery to others. He was a hard-headed man of business; he was indefatigable; he ‘knew how to be complaisant and how and when to assert his independence’; he was judicious in the floating of Government loans; and he lived within his means. We may accept Mr. Coleridge’s summary of his business career, and take his word for it that the rolling up of money went forward uneventfully enough. To the outsider there is a certain grimness in the spectacle. Who is master and who is slave? The two seem mixed in bitter conflict of some sort — such groans escape him now and then, and the lean, wire-drawn face, with the tight-closed lips and the anxious eyes, wears such an expression of nervous apprehension. Once, when he was driving with his old friend Colonel Crawfurd, he sat silent hour after hour, and the Colonel, reaching home, wrote in a fury to demand an explanation of ‘this silent contempt’, which in another would have demanded sword or pistol. ‘ It is too, too foolish’, exclaimed poor Coutts; the truth was merely that ‘my spirit’s gone, and my mind worn and harras’d’, and ‘I am now rather an object of pity than resentment’.

  But whatever secret anguish compelled the richest man in England to drive hour after hour in silence, there were also amenities and privileges attached to his state which lightened the office gloom and tinged the ledgers with radiance. The reader becomes aware of a curious note in the tone in which his correspondents address him. There is an intimate, agonized strain in all their voices. His correspondents were some of the greatest people in the land; yet they wrote generally with their own hands, and often added the injunction: ‘Burn this Letter the moment it is read’... ‘Name it not to my Lord ‘, this particular document continues, ‘ or to any creature on earth’. For royal as they were, beautiful, highly gifted, they were all in straits for money; all came to Thomas Coutts; all approached him as suppliants and sinners beseeching his help and confessing their follies as if he were something between doctor and priest. He hard from Lady Chatham the story of her distress when the payment of Chatham’s pension was delayed; he bestowed £10,000 upon Charles James Fox, and earned his effusive gratitude; the Royal Dukes laid their said circumstances before him; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, confessed her gambling losses, called him her dear friend and died in his debt. Lady Hester Stanhope thundered and growled melodiously enough from the top of Mount Lebanon. Naturally, then, Thomas Coutts had only to say what he wanted, and some very powerful people bestirred themselves to get it for him. He wanted introductions for his daughters among the French nobility; he wanted George the Fourth to bank with him; he wanted the King’s leave to drive his carriage through St. James’s Park. But he wanted some things that not even the Duchess of Devonshire could procure. He wanted health; he wanted a son-in-law.

  There was, Mr. Coleridge says, ‘a singular dearth of suitors for his daughters and his ducats’. Was it that Mrs. Coutts had in her housemaid days thrown soapsuds over Lord Dundonald? Or was it that the presence of madness in the Coutts family showed itself unmistakably in the frequent ‘ nervous complaints ‘ of the three sisters? At any rate, Sophia, the youngest, was nineteen when she became engaged to Francis Burdett; and heiresses presumably should be wearing their coronets years before that. Then her two elder sisters pledged their affections suitably enough. But love always came among the Couttses wearing the mask of tragedy or comedy, or both together in grotesque combination. The two young men, thus singled out, against all advice and entreaty rushed the Falls of Schaffhausen in an open punt. Both were drowned. Two years later Susan recovered sufficiently to marry Lord Guilford, and after mourning for seven years Fanny accepted Lord Bute; but Lord Bute was a widower of fifty-six with nine children, and Lord Guilford fell from his horse ‘ when in the act of presenting a basket of fruit to Miss Coutts’, and so injured his spine that he languished in bodily suffering for years before, prematurely, he died.

  But from all those impressions and turns of phrase which, more than any statement of facts, shape life in biographies as they do in reality, we are convinced that Thomas Coutts loved his daughters intensely and sincerely, pitying their sufferings, devising pleasures and comforts for them, and sometimes, perhaps, wishing to be assured that when all was said and done they were happy, which, upon the same evidence, it is easy to guess that they were not. Even in these days Sir Francis Burdett caused his father-in-law some anxiety. The following extract hints the reason of it:

  Going to Piccadilly yesterday at two o’clock, I met Mr. Burdett.... I asked him where he was going... I asked him if he had been under any engagement to Mr. Whitefoord, upon which, to do him justice, he blushed — and, with great signs of astonishment, confessed that he had entirely forgot it, though he had particularly remembered it the day before... To us, exact people, these things seem strange.

  Probably Mr. Coutts was not altogether surprised to find that a man who was capable of forgetting an engagement could defy the House of Commons, stand a siege in his house, be taken forth by Life Guards through a crowd shouting ‘Burdett for ever!’ and suffer imprisonment in the Tower. Later, Coutts had to insist that his son-in-law should leave his house; but on that occasion our sympathies are with the banker. Like most people, Sir Francis lost his temper, his manners, his humanity, and everything decent about him when he was in danger of losing a legacy. But for the present the legacies were secure, and the surface of life was splendid and serene. Mr. and Mrs. Coutts lived in the great house in Stratton Street; they travelled from one fine country seat to another, the guests of a Duke here, of an Earl there; their wealth increased and increased, and Thomas Coutts was consulted upon delicate matters by Prime Ministers and Kings. He acted as ambassador between the House of Hanover and the House of Stuart — almost equally to his delight, he transmitted winter petticoats from Paris to Devonshire House.

  But the splendid surface had deep cracks in it, and when William the Fourth dined with the Couttses, Mrs. Coutts — so he declared — would always whisper to him on the way downstairs, ‘Sir, are you not George the Third’s father?’ ‘I always answered in the affirmative,’ said the King... ‘there’s no use contradicting women, young or old, eh?’ She was losing her wits. For the last ten years of her life she was out of her mind. But old Coutts would have her lead the King down to dinner, and would tend her faithfully himself when doctors and daughters besought him to put her under control. He was a devoted husband.

  At the same time he was a devoted lover. During the ten years that Mrs. Coutts was going from bad to worse and being tenderly cared for by her husband, he was lavishing horses, carriages, villas, sums in the ‘Long Annuities’, upon a young actress in Little Russell Street. The paradox has disturbed his biographers. Leaving to others the task of determining how far the relation between the old banker and the young woman was immoral, we must admit that we like him all the better for it; more, it seems to prove that he loved his wife. For the first time he hears the birds at dawn and notices the spring leaves. Like his Harriot, birds and leaves seem to him innocent and fresh.

  You who can look to Heaven with so much pleasure and so pure a heart must have great pleasure in viewing such beautiful skies... eat light nourishing food — mutton roast and broiled is the best — porter is not good for you... I kiss the paper you are to look upon and beg you to kiss it just here. Your dear lips will then have touched what mine touch just now.... The estate of Otham, you see, I have enquired about. Your 3 p. ct. Consol and Long Annuity....

  So it goes on from birds to flannel night-caps, from eternal devotion to profitable investments; but the strain that links together all these diverse notes is his recurring and constant adoration for Harriot’s ‘ pure, innocent, honest, kind, affectionate heart’. It was a terrible blow to his daughters and sons-in-law to find that at his age he was capable of entertaining such illusions. When it came out that, four days after Mrs. Coutts was buried, the old gentleman of seventy-nine had hurri
ed off to St. Pancras Church and married himself (illegally, as it turned out, by one of those misadventures which always beset the Coutts family when they were in love) to an actress of no birth and robust physique, the lamentations that rent the family in twain were bitter in the extreme. What would become of his money? As they could not ask this openly, they took the more roundabout way of ‘imputing to the servants’ at Stratton Street that Mrs. Coutts was poisoning her husband and was in the habit of receiving men in her bedroom when half-undressed. Coutts replied to his daughters and his sons-in-law in bitter, agitated letters which make painful, though spirited, reading after a hundred years. How they tortured him! How they grudged him his happiness! How grateful he would have been for a word of sympathy! Still, he had his Harriot, and though she was only gone into the next room, he must write her a letter to say how he loves her and trusts her and begs her not to mind the spiteful things that his family say about her. ‘ Your constant, happy, and most affectionate husband ‘ he signs himself, and she invokes ‘My beloved Tom!’ Indeed, Harriot deserved every penny she got, and we rejoice to think that she got them all. She was a generous woman. She was bountiful to her stepdaughters; she was always burying broken-down actors in luxury, and putting up marble tablets to their memories; and she married a Duke. But every year of her life she drove down to Little Russell Street, got out of her carriage, dismissed her servants, and walked along the dirty lane to have a look at the house where she had begun life as ‘a poor little player child’. And once, long after Tom was dead, she dreamed of Tom, and noted on the flyleaf of her Prayer Book how he had come to her looking ‘well, tranquil, and divine. He anxiously desired me to change my shoes’, which was, no doubt, true to the life; but in the dream it was ‘ for fear of taking cold, as I had walked through waters to him’, which somehow touches us as if Tom and Harriot had walked through bitter waters to rescue their little fragment of love from all that money.

  The Dream

  THIS is a depressing book. It leaves one with a feeling not of humiliation, that is too strong a word, nor of disgust, that is too strong also. It makes us feel — it is to Mr. Bullock’s credit as a biographer — that we have been watching a stout white dog performing tricks in front of an audience which eggs it on, but at the same time jeers. There is nothing in the life and death of a best-seller that need cause us this queasiness. The lives of those glorious geese Florence Barclay and Ella Wheeler Wilcox can be read without a blush for them or for ourselves. They were performers too — conjurors who tumbled bank notes, billiard balls, fluttering pigeons out of very seedy hats. But they lived, and they lived with such gusto that no one can fail to share it. With Marie Corelli it was different.

  Her life began with a trick and rather a shady trick. The editor of the Illustrated London News, a married man, ‘wandering round Stratford-on-Avon church’ fell in love with a woman. That bald statement must be draped. Dr. Mackay committed an immoral act with a female who was not of his own social standing. ‘This unwelcome flowering of his lighter moments’, as Mr. Bullock calls it — Corelliism is catching — was a child. But she was not called Marie and she was not called Corelli. Those were names that she invented later to drape the fact. Most of her childhood was spent draping facts in the ‘ Dream Hole ‘, a mossy retreat in a dell at Box Hill. Sometimes George Meredith appeared for a moment among the tendrils. But she never saw him. Wrapped in what she called later ‘the flitting phantasmagoria of the universal dream’ she saw only one person — herself. And that self, sometimes called Thelma, sometimes Mavis Clare, draped in white satin, hung with pure lilies, and exhibited twice a year in stout volumes for which the public paid her ten thousand pounds apiece, is as damning an indictment of Victorian taste in one way as the Albert Memorial is in another. Of those two excrescences, perhaps that which we call Marie Corelli is the more painful. The Albert Memorial is empty; but within the other erection was a live human being. It was not her fault; society blew that golden bubble, as Miss Corelli herself might have written, from the black seed of shame. She was ashamed of her mother. She was ashamed of her birth. She was ashamed of her face, of her accent, of her poverty. Most girls, as empty-headed and commonplace as she was, would have shared her shame, but they would have hidden it — under the table-cloth, behind the chiffonier. But nature had endowed her with a prodigious power of making public confession of this small ignoble vice. Instead of hiding herself she exposed herself. From her earliest days she had a rage for publicity. ‘I’ll be “somebody”’, she told her governess. ‘I’ll be as unlike anybody else as I can!’ ‘That would hardly be wise,’ said Miss Knox placidly. ‘You would then be called eccentric.’ But Miss Knox need not have been afraid. Marie Corelli did not wish to be unlike anybody else; she wanted to be as like everybody else in general, and the British aristocracy in particular, as it was possible to be. But to attain that object she had only one weapon — the dream. Dreams, apparently, if made of the right material, can be astonishingly effective. She dreamt so hard, she dreamt so efficiently, that with two exceptions all her dreams came true. Not even Marie Corelli could dream her shifty half-brother into the greatest of English poets, though she worked hard to ‘get him made Poet Laureate’, or transform her very dubious father into an eminent Victorian man of letters. All that she could do for Dr. Mackay was to engage the Caledonian pipers to play at his funeral and to postpone that function from a foggy day to a fine one in order that his last appearance might be given full publicity. Otherwise all her dreams materialized. Ponies, motor-cars, dresses, houses furnished ‘like the tea lounge at the Earl’s Court Exhibition’, gondolas, expensively-bound editions of Shakespeare — all were hers. Cheques accumulated. Invitations showered. The Prince of Wales held her hand in his. ‘Out of small things what wonders rise’, he murmured. Gladstone called on her and stayed for two hours. ‘ Ardath’, he is reported to have said, ‘is a magnificent conception.’ On Easter Sunday the Dean of Westminster quoted Barabbas from the pulpit. No words, the Dean said, could be more beautiful. Rostand translated her novels. The whole audience at Stratford-on-Avon rose to its feet when she came into the theatre.

  All her dreams came true. But it was the dream that killed her. For inside that ever-thickening carapace of solid dream the commonplace vigorous little woman gradually ceased to live. She became harder, duller, more prudish, more conventional; and at the same time more envious and more uneasy. The only remedy that revived her was publicity. And like other drug-takers she could only live by increasing the dose. Her tricks became more and more extravagant. On May Day she drove through the streets behind ponies wreathed in flowers; she floated down the Avon in a gondola called The Dream with a real gondolier in a scarlet sash. The press resounded with her lawsuits, her angry letters, her speeches. And then even the Press turned nasty. They omitted to say that she had been present at the Braemar gathering. They gave full publicity to the fact that she had been caught hoarding sugar.

  For her there is some excuse. But how are we to excuse the audience that applauded the exhibition. Queen Victoria and Mr. Gladstone can be excepted. The taste of the exalted is apt to become dropsical. And there is excuse for ‘the million’, as Marie Corelli called them — if her books saved one working-man from suicide, or allowed a dressmaker’s drudge here and there to dream that she, too, was Thelma or Mavis Clare, there were not films then to sustain them with plush and glow and rapture after the day’s work. But what are we to say of Oscar Wilde? His compliments may have been ambiguous; but he paid them, and he printed her stories. And what are we to say of the great ladies of her adored aristocracy? ‘She is a common little thing’, one of them remarked. But no lunch or dinner party was complete without her. And what are we to say of Mr. Arthur Severn? ‘Pendennis’ she called him. He accepted her hospitality, tolerated that effusion which she was pleased to call her passion, and then made fun of her accent. ‘Ouwels’, she said instead of ‘owls’, and he laughed at her. And what are we to say of the press that levelled all its cameras at th
e stout old woman who was ashamed of her birth, ‘got busy’ about her mother — was her name Cody or was it Kirtland? — was she a bricklayer’s daughter or an Italian countess? — who had borne this illegitimate child?

  But though it would be a relief to end in a burst of righteous indignation, the worst of this book is that it provokes no such glow, but only the queasiness with which we watch a decked-up dog performing rather ordinary tricks. It is a relief when the performance is over. Only, unfortunately, that is not altogether the fact. For, still at Stratford-on-Avon, Mason Croft is kept precisely as it was when Marie Corelli lived there. There is the silver ink-pot still full of ink as she left it; the hands of the clock still point to 7.15 as they did when she died; all her manuscripts are carefully preserved under glass cases; and the ‘large, empty bed, covered with a heavy white quilt, which is more awe-inspiring than a corpse, as a scarcely clothed dancer excites more than does a nude’ awaits the dreamer. So Stratford-on-Avon, along with other relics, preserves a lasting monument to the taste of the Victorian Age.