Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Elizabeth Lady Holland.

  Two handsome volumes, with large print and wide margins, portraits, annotations, and introduction, give us after a lapse of almost a century the diary which Lady Holland kept from the year 1791 to the year 1811. At the same time Mr Lloyd Sanders publishes The Holland House Circle’, a thick volume with many chapters. Each chapter represents a different group of men and women, of all ranks and callings, and is distinguished generally by one important name. But the chief interest of these groups lies in the fact that they were once dispersed about the great drawing-rooms at Holland House, and that the people composing them had been picked out from the tumult of London, and drawn to this one spot by the power of Lady Holland and her husband. Indeed, so much time has passed that it begins to seem strange to us that the imperious-looking lady who sits with her foot displayed in Leslie’s picture, as though subjects bowed to her throne, should once have gone upstairs to her room, taken out a sheet of paper, and written down what she thought of the scene. We are told continually how she snubbed people, how she dropped her fan, how she sat at the head of her table and listened to the cleverest talk in England until she was bored, and cried out: ‘Enough of this, Macaulay!’ But it is hard to remember that she passed through many more experiences than usually fall to the share of women, so that when she sat at her table she may have been thinking of different scenes and marvelling at the accidents that had brought her to this position. Until Lord Ilchester published her diaries there was only material for such A book as that by Mr Lloyd Sanders; we only knew what impression she had made on other people, and had to guess what she had been feeling herself. She was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman of Jamaica, Richard Vassall, and he married her to Sir Godfrey Webster, of Battle Abbey, when she was but fifteen. By her own account she had run wild, picked up her learning where she might, and come by her views without help from anyone else. It was not from lack of care on her parents’ part; they were too fond of her to tame her; and it was quite consistent with their affection that when they saw her grown a fine girl with a proud spirit they should think that she deserved to marry. A baronet who was almost twenty-three years her elder, who owned a country seat, was Member of Parliament, and was ‘immensely popular in the country, perhaps partly on account of his liberality and extravagance’, must have appeared to them mainly in the light of a fine career for their daughter; there could be no question of love. At the time of their marriage Sir Godfrey lived in a small house close to the Abbey; the building itself was tenanted by his aunt. One may gather something of young Lady Webster’s temper from the question which she used to send across to the Abbey in the mornings: ‘If the old hag was dead yet.’ The days in the little Sussex village were dreary enough, for Elizabeth amused herself by rambling over the great house, which had fallen into ruins, and rattling chains, like a naughty child, to frighten her aunt. Her husband was busy with local affairs, and, though he had some of the simple tastes of a country gentleman, was not a husband whom a clever young woman could ignore; he was not merely rough, but his temper was violent; he gambled, and he sank into fits of depression. From all these circumstances Lady Webster conceived such a picture of life in the country that she always shuddered at the thought of it afterwards, and wrote, on leaving a country house, that she felt as though she had ‘escaped from some misfortune’. But even as a girl it was not her way to suffer when anything could be done by protesting. She worried her husband with her restlessness until he consented to travel. One must not deny that he made some effort to see her point of view, and had enough affection to try to satisfy her, for to travel in those days of coaches and to leave his own corner of Sussex must have been a genuine hardship for an important man. Lady Webster, at all events, had her way, and it is likely that she gave her husband fewer thanks for the sacrifice than he deserved. They set off for Italy in 1791, and it was then, being twenty years of age, that Lady Webster began to keep a diary. An English traveller in the eighteenth century could not profit completely by the experience unless he wrote down what he had seen and reflected; something was always left over at the end of the day which had to be disposed of thus, and Lady Webster began her diary from such an impulse. It is written to propitiate her own eye when she reads it later in Sussex; to assure her that she was doing her duty with all her faculties, and that she was going about the world as a sensible young Englishwoman, much like other people. But one imagines that she would never feel on easy terms with this version of herself, and would turn to the pages more and more for a date or a fact, and would soon dissociate herself entirely from her reflections. Her case differs a little, however, from the usual one. From her earliest youth Lady Webster seems to have had a quality which saved her diary from the violent fate of diaries, and spared the writer her blushes; she could be as impersonal as a boy of ten and as intelligent as a politician. How far she really cared to know that flax is grown by the inhabitants of Kempten, and that they must consume their produce themselves, ‘for there are no navigable rivers’, one cannot tell; but she thought it worth while to observe the fact, and proceeded quite naturally to moralize ‘perhaps they are happier without facility of intercourse’, for commerce breeds luxury, and luxury leads to a love of gain, and thus ‘simplicity of manners’ is destroyed, which the moralist felt to be a pity. What strange conversations and what gloomy silences there must have been in the post-chaise! The young lady was indefatigable, and honestly scorned her husband because he had no enthusiasms and no theories.

  When they got to Rome the situation was even worse. Lady Webster was beginning to be aware of the fact that she was a remarkable young woman, and all the masterpieces of the world were here to prove it. She set out directly upon her ‘course of virtu’, tramped through galleries, craned her neck back, looked intently where ‘old Morrison’ bade her look, and wrote stiff sentences of admiration in her diary. When her husband came with her he either hurried her along, so that she could not see the pictures, or flew into such a passion that she could not distinguish them. The pictures, it is clear, threw a disastrous light upon Sir Godfrey. At Rome, too, there were sympathetic married ladies who assured Elizabeth that her husband was a monster, and encouraged her to see herself in a tragic light. She sobbed herself sick, reflected that human miseries must have an end, and pitied herself for thinking so. But there is no doubt that she was unhappy, however one may apportion the blame; for one must pity any young woman of twenty-two who leans out of her window at night, snuffs the air, sees water gleaming, and feels a strange stir in her spirit, and yet must write a few days later that she is now able to laugh at her husband’s menaces, although they used to terrify her. It is natural to dread one’s own faults, and to feel a peculiar dislike for the circumstances that develop them, for they make you ignoble in your own eyes; and the strain of bitterness which we trace in Lady Webster’s diaries points to the presence of this discomfort. She knew that she was disposed to be hard, and she resented treatment which drove her to it, for she was a proud woman, and would have liked to admire herself unreservedly. In Italy, too, she felt often what she had seldom felt in England: hours of confused happiness in which the land was fair and she was young, and wonderful capacities stirred within her. She could not soothe such ecstasies with any of her ‘cold maxims of solitary comfort’, but admitted the thought of ‘another’ for her ‘heart to open itself into’. Directly that other had shown what he could do in relieving her she dismissed him in agitation, comforting herself with the reflection that there was a ‘want of passion’ in her nature which would save her from many disasters. ‘But what will be my resource if both head and heart accord in their choice?’ Her honesty drove her to ask herself that question, but it is evident that it alarmed her still as much as it excited her.

  It was in Florence, not a year after the words were written, that she met Lord Holland for the first time. He was a young man of twenty-one, just returning from his travels in Spain. Her first impression is as direct as usual: ‘Lord H. is not in the leas
t handsome.’ She notes his ‘pleasingness of manner and liveliness of conversation’; but it was the ‘complex disorder’ in his left leg ‘called an ossification of the muscles’, that interested her most, for, like other practical women, she had a great curiosity about physical disease and loved the society of doctors. She repeats their phrases as though she flattered herself that they meant more to her than to most people. One cannot trace the friendship accurately, for it was not the purpose of her diary to follow her feelings closely, or indeed to record them at all, except to sum them up now and then in a businesslike way, as though she made a note in shorthand for future use. But Lord Holland became one of that singular company of English people, travelling in Italy in the last years of the eighteenth century, whom we come upon later in the first years of the nineteenth when we read the story of Shelley, Byron, and Trelawny. They went about together, like adventurers in a strange land, sharing carriages and admiring statues, had their own little society in Florence and Rome, and were allied generally by birth and wealth and the peculiarity of their taste for the fine arts. Sir Godfrey (it is no wonder) grew restive, and was impatient to put an end to this aimless wandering with a family of small children in a land of foreigners, among pictures and ruins which bored him acutely. One entry, made at Rome, shows us what was going on in the spring of 1794: ‘Almost the whole of our Neapolitan set was there... we all made an excursion to Tivoli. I conveyed Lord Holland, Mr Marsh and Beauclerk... We got back late at night... In the course of our evenings Lord H. resolved to make me admire a poet... Cowper. My evenings were agreeable... A sharp fit of gout, brought on by drinking Orvieto wine did not increase the good temper of (my husband).’ One of the attractive features of those early Italian travels is the leisure that people had, and the instinct, natural in a beautiful land far from all duties, which made them fill it with long hours of aimless reading. Lady Webster says of herself that she ‘devoured books’, histories, philosophies, serious books for the most part, to increase her knowledge. But Lord Holland made her read poetry; he read Pope’s ‘Iliad’ aloud, besides a translation of Herodotus, ‘a good deal of Bayle and a great variety of English poetry’. Her head was conquered, and that, in Lady Webster’s case, was the only way to her heart. Sir Godfrey left her alone in Italy for months together; finally, in May 1795, he returned to England without her. The diary is still as sensible as ever; one might imagine her a cultivated British matron with all the natural supports. But, remembering that she had not determined to defy the law and to honour her own passion, there is something more highly strung than usual in the record of her days. She never repents, or analyses her conduct, her diary is still occupied with Correggio and the Medid family and the ruts in the roads. She drove about Italy with her own retinue, spending a few days in one place, a week in another, and settling in Florence for the winter. Lord Holland’s name occurs again and again, and always as naturally as another’s. But there is a freedom in her manner, a kind of pride in her happiness, which seems to show that she was perfectly confident of her own morality. In April, Lord Holland and Lady Webster travelled back to England together; Sir Godfrey divorced his wife in July 1797, and in the same month she became Lady Holland. Something remarkable might have been expected from such a marriage, for the feeling between a husband and wife who have won each other by such means will not be conventional or easy to explain. One does not know, for instance, how far Lady Holland was led to live the life she did from a sense of gratitude to her husband, and one suspects that Lord Holland was tender and considerate beyond what was natural to him because his wife had made an immense sacrifice on his behalf. He saw, what other people did not see, that she was sometimes made to suffer. One can be sure at least that the oddities were only superficial, and that Lord and Lady Holland, grown old and sedate, never forgot that they had once been in league together against the world, or saw each other without a certain thrill. ‘Oh, my beloved friend,’ exclaimed Lady Holland, ‘how hast thou, by becoming mine, endeared the everyday occurrences of life!’

  I loved you much at twenty-four:

  I love you better at three-score

  was, so Lord Holland wrote when they had been married for thirty-four years, the

  One truth which, be it verse or prose,

  From my heart’s heart sincerely flows.

  If that is so, we must admire them both the more for it, remembering what a reputation Lady Holland won for herself in those years, and how difficult she must have been to live with.

  She may well have taken possession of Holland House with a vow to repay herself for wasted time and a determination to make the best of herself and of other people at last. She was determined also to serve Lord Holland in his career; and those unhappy years when she had roamed about the Continent, making her sensible observations, had taught her, at least, habits that were useful to her now, ‘to talk the talk of men’ and to feel keenly the life in people round her. The house at once, with such a mistress, came to have a character of its own. But who shall say why it is that people agree to meet in one spot, or what qualities go to make a salon? In this case the reason why they came seems to have been largely because Lady Holland wished them to come. The presence of someone with a purpose gives shape to shapeless gatherings of people; they take on a character when they meet which serves ever after to stamp the hours so spent. Lady Holland was young and handsome, her past life had given her a decision and a fearlessness which made her go further in one interview than other women in a hundred. She had read a great deal of robust English fiction, histories and travels, Juvenal in a translation, Montaigne and Voltaire and La Rochefoucauld in the French. ‘I have no prejudices to combat with/ she wrote; so that the freest thinker could speak his mind in her presence. The reputation of this brilliant and outspoken young woman spread quickly among the politicians, and they came in numbers to dine or sleep or even to watch her dress in the morning. Perhaps they laughed when they discussed her afterwards, but she carried her main point triumphantly - that they should come to see her. Two years after her marriage she notes: Today I had fifty visitors.’ Her diary becomes a memorandum book of anecdotes and political news; and it is very seldom that she raises her eyes for a moment to consider what it is all about. But at one point she gives us a clue, and observes that although she cares for her old friends best she seeks new acquaintances ‘with avidity’, because ‘mixing with a variety of people is an advantage to Lord H.’. One must live with one’s kind and know them, or ‘the mind becomes narrowed to the standard of your own set’, as the life of Canning had shown her. There was so much good sense always in what Lady Holland said that it was difficult to protest if her actions, in their excessive vigour, became dangerous. She took up politics for Lord Holland’s sake, with the same determination, and became before long a far greater enthusiast than he was; but, again, she was able and broad-minded. Such was her success, indeed, that it can be said by a student of the time - nearly a hundred years after it has all faded away - ‘Holland House was a political council chamber... and the value of such a centre to a party under exclusively aristocratic leadership was almost incalculable’. But, however keen she became as a politician, we must not pretend that she inspired Ministers, or was the secret author of policies that have changed the world. Her success was of a different nature; for it is possible even now, with her diaries before us, to reconstruct something of her character and to see how, in the course of years, it told upon that portion of the world which came in contact with it.

  When we think of her we do not remember witty things that she said; we remember a long series of scenes in which she shows herself insolent, or masterful, or whimsical with the whimsicality of a spoilt great lady who confounds all the conventions as it pleases her. But there is some quality in a scene like the following, trivial as it is, which makes you realize at once the effect of her presence in the room, her way of looking at you, her attitude even, and her tap with her fan. Macaulay describes a breakfast party. ‘Lady Holland told us her dream
s; how she had dreamed that a mad dog bit her foot, and how she set off to Brodie, and lost her way in St Martin’s Lane, and could not find him. She hoped, she said, the dream would not come true.’ Lady Holland had her superstitions. We trace it again in her words to Moore, This will be a dull book of yours, this “Sheridan”, I fear’; or at dinner to her dependant, Mr Allen, ‘Mr Allen, there is not enough turtle soup for you. You must take gravy soup or none.’ We seem to feel, however dimly, the presence of someone who is large and emphatic, who shows us fearlessly her peculiarities because she does not mind what we think of them, and who has, however, peremptory and unsympathetic she may be, an extraordinary force of character. She makes certain things in the world stand up boldly all round her; she calls out certain qualities in other people. While she is there, it is her world; and all the things in the room, the ornaments, the scents, the books that lie on the table, are hers and express her. It is less obvious, but we expect that the whole of the strange society which met round her board owed its flavour to Lady Holland’s freaks and passions. It is less obvious, because Lady Holland is far from eccentric in her journal, and adopts more and more as time goes by the attitude of a shrewd man of business who is well used to the world and well content with it. She handles numbers of men and women, rough-hews a portrait of them, and sums up their value. ‘His taste is bad; he loves society, but has no selection, and swallows wine for quantity not quality; he is gross in everything...”He is honourable, just, and true.’ These characters are done in a rough style, as though she slashed her clay, now this side, now that. But what numbers of likenesses she struck off, and with what assurance! Indeed, she had seen so much of the world and had such knowledge of families, tempers, and money matters, that with greater concentration she might have shaped a cynical reflection in which a lifetime of observation was compressed. ‘Depraved men,’ she writes, “are in a corrupt state of things, but yet they like the names of virtues as much as they abhor the practice.’ La Rochefoucauld is often on her lips. But merely to have dealt with so many people and to have kept the mastery over them is in itself the proof of a remarkable mind. Hers was the force that held them together, and showed them in a certain light, and kept them in the places she assigned to them. She took in the whole sweep of the world, and imprinted it with her own broad mark. For not only could she subdue all that happened ordinarily in daily life, but she did not falter when the loftiest heights, which might well have seemed beyond her range, lay across her path. She sent for Wordsworth. ‘He came. He is much superior to his writings, and his conversation is even beyond his abilities. I should almost fear he is disposed to apply his talents more towards making himself a vigorous conversationalist... than to improve his style of composition. He holds some opinions upon picturesque subjects with which I completely differ... He seems well read in his provincial history.’