Monstrous and absurd as it is, may we not find there some clue to her success? When anyone is able to master all the facts she meets with, so that they fall into some order in her mind, she will present a formidable figure to other people, who will complain that she owes her strength to her lack of perception; but at the same time so smooth a shape of the world appears in her presence that they find peace in contemplating it, and almost love the creator. Her rule was much abused in her lifetime, and even now we are disposed to make little of it. We need not claim that it was ever of very great importance; but if we recall her at all we cannot, after all these years, pretend that it has no existence. She still sits on her chair as Leslie painted her - a hard woman perhaps, but undoubtedly a strong and courageous one.
Lady Hester Stanhope.
The writers in the Dictionary of National Biography have a pleasant habit of summing up a life, before they write it, in one word, thus - ‘Stanhope, Lady Hester Lucy (1776-1839), eccentric.’ The reason why her life is written at all is that she differed from other people, but never converted them to her own way of thinking. Mrs Roundell, who has written the latest account of her, is sympathetic and respectful, but she is clearly no convert. One feels that she is smoothing over eccentricities, as though we were all at a tea party together. It would be polite there to remark, ‘Lady Hester is very fond of cats,’ but in private, and writing is private, one should allow oneself to luxuriate in the fact that she kept forty-eight of them, choosing them for the harmony of their stars with her own, joining in a deep bass voice with their music at night, and accusing her doctor of a lumpish, cold, effeminate disposition if he found the noise intolerable. But the merit of Mrs Roundell’s work, together with its simplicity and its quotations from later writers, is that it brings or recalls to our notice a most entertaining book. The Memoirs and Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope’, by Dr Meryon, in six volumes. The charm of Dr Meryon’s work lies in its comprehensiveness. He lived with her off and on for twenty-eight years, and the people we live with are the last we seek to define in one word. Dr Meryon never attempted it. To him she was not an eccentric by profession, but a lady of exalted birth, who condescended when she shook hands with him, a woman of political greatness, inspired at times, with a spell like Circe. As a middle-class Englishman, as a doctor, as a man respecting woman’s courage but a little touched by the need for it, he felt her charm. She treated him like a servant, but the ‘magical illusion which she ever contrived to throw around herself in the commonest circumstances of life’ kept its glamour. Happily the conditions of life on Mount Lebanon in the ‘thirties of the last century allowed him to write profusely, and gave him only the one subject to treat. When he got back at dawn from those long audiences, by the end of which the lady was hidden in smoke, he tried to put down the stories and to express the kind of stupefaction with which she overwhelmed him.
Very little, unfortunately, is known of Lady Hester’s early life. When she kept house for William Pitt she made herself disliked, presumably, from the account that she gives of her triumphs. With a scanty education but great natural force, she despised people without troubling to give them a reason for it. Intuition took the place of argument, and her penetration was great. ‘Fort grande, fort maigre, fort décidée, fort indépendante’ a French lady describes her as a girl in the ball-room; she herself recalled her complexion of alabaster and her lips of carnation. Further, she had a conviction of the rights of the aristocracy, and ordered her life from an eminence which made her conduct almost sublime. ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed; ‘what do you mean by principle? - I am a Pitt.’ Unluckily her sex closed the proper channels. ‘If you were a man, Hester,’ Mr Pitt would say, ‘I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche; and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail, and not one soldier would go with his shoes unblacked.’ But, as it was, her powers fermented within her; she detested her sex, as though in revenge for the limitations with which ordinary women cramp remarkable ones; and drove herself as near madness as one can go by feeding a measureless ambition upon phantoms.
When her uncle died she had a pension of fifteen hundred a year and a house in Montague-square; but she pointed out in a remarkable conversation how these conditions are precisely the most intolerable if you are a person of rank. They condemn you to nothing less than imprisonment in your own drawing-room, for you cannot do yourself justice in the streets upon such a pittance. She preferred to sacrifice her health rather than lower her standards, until it occurred to her that simplicity, so extreme that no one can connect it with necessity, is the other way of being distinguished. Accordingly she retired to a cottage at Builth, in Wales, where she lived in a room ‘not more than a dozen feet square’, ‘curing the poor’ and keeping a diary. She was then thirty-two. With a mixture of true greatness and grandiloquence, she determined that English ways of life are made to suit timid herds, and that a remarkable person must seek a land less corrupted by hypocrisy, where nature prevails. With what expectations she set sail for the East we know not, but she emerged in Syria, astride her horse, in the trousers of a Turkish gentleman. For the rest of her life she did nothing but shake her fist at England, where the people had forgotten their great men.
As usual, her sublimity was accompanied by a touch of the ridiculous. It is impossible not to feel that the presence of Mrs Fry, the respectable English maid, impaired the romance of the cavalcade. Dressed in men’s clothes, she was expected to ride like a man, but with the heroism of her class she persisted in sitting ‘in the decorous posture customary with women in England’, and was thus ‘often exposed to the danger of falling from her ass’. Then, how pathetic were her attempts to redeem the wild Eastern names to the semblance at least of Christianity - Phillippaki became Philip Parker and Mustapha Mr Farr. Lady Hester and Dr Meryon saw nothing in this but the feebleness of a womanish disposition. A convent on the slopes of Mount Lebanon was bought, and there Lady Hester settled down to exert her mysterious spells. All round the house, which was perched on the top of a hill, she dug an elaborate garden, from whose terraces one could see the Mediterranean between the hills. Her influence at one time was vast, though vague; the children for twenty miles round Constantinople had heard her name. The apparition of this Englishwoman, with her large frame and her cadaverous face and her connection with august personages in England, was in itself a miracle; the natives thought her neither man nor woman, but a being apart. The chiefs came to her for counsel, because she was absolutely without fear and loved to intrigue.
The English Consuls all along the coast held her in horror. Sitting on her hilltop, she thought that she arranged the affairs of the countryside and overheard the faintest whispers. A sponge diver called Logmagi was sent to pick up news in the seaports and the bazaars of Constantinople, and in particular to report the first tidings of unrest among the people. At once new rooms and secret tunnels were added to the house, till it was shaped like a labyrinth, for she believed that ‘events and catastrophes’ would come to pass, when people of all nations would fly to her, and she would lead them forth to Jerusalem itself, mounted upon one of the two sacred mares which now fattened in her stalls. Upon the other ‘a boy without a father’ would ride, who was none other than the Messiah Himself. For some time the Duke of Reichstadt was the boy of the prophecy, but when he died she ‘fixed on another’.
Talk, since nothing ever happened, became the solace of her life. The memoirs are made out of talk. Wrapped in a white cloak, with a great turban on her head, she sat in the dusk, so that you might not notice how her skin was wrinkled ‘like the network which we see on the rind of some species of melons’, picking spoonfuls of meat and sweetstuff from saucers, and pouring forth her soliloquy. Nothing that had happened in the years she lived with Mr Pitt was forgotten: she remembered how she had snubbed Admiral — , what the Duchess of D. had worn, what a leg had Sir W — R — ; in particular, how Mr Pitt had praised her, and he liked his food. She gossiped as though she were tal
king over the events of the night before, although she sat among broken crockery, in the Syrian mountains, smoking pipes with her doctor, twenty years or more after it had all faded away. Thus she rambled on.
What can be the reason? I am now always thinking of Sir G. H — . I have been thinking how well he would do for Master of the Horse to the Queen, and I have a good way of giving a hint of it through the Buckleys; for I always said that, next to Lord Chatham, nobody ever had such handsome equipages as Sir G.; nobody’s coaches and horses were so neatly picked out as theirs. Sir G. is a man, Doctor, from what you tell me, that would have just suited Mr Pitt. That polished and quiet manner which Sir G. has was what Mr Pitt found so agreeable in Mr Long. It is very odd - Mr Pitt always would dress for dinner, even if we were alone. One day I said to him, ‘You are tired, and there is no one but ourselves; why need you dress?’ He replied, Why, I don’t know, Hester; but if one omits to do it today, we neglect it tomorrow, and so on, until one grows a pig.’
Her spirits fell, and she went on:
To look at me now, what a lesson against vanity! Look at this arm, all skin and bone, so thin, so thin that you may see through it; and once, without exaggeration, so rounded that you could not pinch the skin up. My neck was once so fair that a pearl necklace scarcely showed on it; and men - no fools, but sensible men - would say to me, ‘God has given you a neck you really may be proud of; you are one of Nature’s favourites, and one may be excused for admiring that beautiful skin.’ If they could behold me now, with my teeth all gone and with long lines in my face - not wrinkles, for I have no wrinkles when I am left quiet and not made angry; but my face is drawn out of composure by these wretches. I thank God that old age has come upon me unperceived. When I used to see the painted Lady H., dressed in pink and silver, with her head shaking, and jumped by her footman into her sociable, attempting to appear young, I felt a kind of horror and disgust I can’t describe. I wonder how Lady Stafford dresses now she is no longer young; but I can’t fancy her grown old.
Fierce storms of rage possessed her, and then she would weep with a wild howl painful to hear, as though Bellona should weep. More and more, as time passed without any revolution and her influence waned, and debts crushed her, did she seek the support of magic. Although she had failed to subdue the forces of this world, and the Queen and Lord Palmerston were against her, she was mistress of arts that the vulgar knew nothing of. She saw the sylphs perched on her chest of drawers and clumsy fellows tripped up for ignoring them; seated in the convent at Dar Djoun, she could look into the heart of Paris or of London; she knew the cavern where the King of the Serpents lived, with the head of a man; she knew where to find the lost book of Adam and Eve’s language written in letters a span high; ‘I believe in vampires, but the people in England know not how to distinguish them.’
After a time she never left her hilltop; then she scarcely went beyond her room, but sat in bed, arguing, scolding, and ringing bells perpetually, the floor littered with pipes and bits of string; she was never to ride into Jerusalem upon her mare, and the aristocratic ideal remained high. She would let no European come near her, and at last she turned even Dr Meryon away. In June 1839, the news came to Beirut that she had died with only native servants round her. Rooms were found full of mouldy stores hoarded for the great emergency, but her valuables had been stolen while she lay helpless. The dead lady looked ‘composed and placid’, but she was so much in the habit of hiding her feelings that her expression told nothing. She was buried in a corner of her rose garden in the grave of a certain prophet, where she had not wished to be buried. Ten years later the place was a thicket of brambles and roses; now there are lines of mulberry trees. But Lady Hester, the last of the great English aristocrats, lives on in despite of the plough.
The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.
There are good reasons why, when an actress promises to give us her memoirs, we should feel an unusual interest and excitement even. She lives before us in many shapes and in many circumstances, the instrument of this passion and of that. Meanwhile, if we choose to remember it, she also sits in passive contemplation some little way withdrawn, in an attitude which we must believe to be one of final significance. It might be urged that it is the presence of this contrast that gives meaning to the most trivial of her actions, and some additional poignancy to the most majestic. We know, too, that each part she plays deposits its own small contribution upon her unseen shape, until it is complete and distinct from its creations at the same time that it inspires them with life. And when she undertakes to show us what manner of woman this has become, should we not feel an exceptional gratitude and an interest that is more than usually complex?
Perhaps no woman now alive could tell us more strange things, of herself and of life, than Sarah Bernhardt. It is true that when she comes to this final act of revelation she makes use of certain conventions, poses herself with greater care than we could wish, before she allows the curtain to rise; but that, too, is characteristic, and, to drop all metaphor, her book surely should do what none of her parts has done, and show us what cannot be shown upon the stage.
She was brought up in the Convent of Grands Champs at Versailles, and her life at once forms itself into separate and brightly coloured beads; they succeed each other, but they scarcely connect. She was so intensely organized even then that there were explosions when she came into contact for the first time with hard things in the world outside her. When she was confronted by the sad walls of the convent, she exclaimed: ‘Papa, papa! I won’t go to prison. This is a prison, I am sure.’ But at that moment a ‘little round short woman’ came out veiled to the mouth. After she had talked for a time she saw that Sarah was trembling, and with some strange instinct she raised her veil wholly for a second. ‘I then saw the sweetest and merriest face imaginable... I flung myself at once into her arms.’ Her actions within the walls were as sudden and as passionate. Her hair, for example, grew thick and curled, and the sister who had to comb it in the early morning tugged callously. ‘I flung myself upon her, and with feet, teeth, hands, elbows, head, and indeed all my poor little body, I hit and thumped, yelling at the same time.’ The pupils and the sisters came running, they muttered their prayers and waved their holy signs, at a distance, until the Mother Prefect had recourse to a further charm and dashed a spray of holy water over the active devil of Sarah Bernhardt. But after all this spiritual display it was the good Mother Superior, with her sure instinct for effect, who conquered by no more potent charm than ‘an expression of pity’. But such tempers were partly the result of the extreme fragility of her health. It is more significant to read how she built up for herself the reputation of a ‘personality’ among her fellows. She carried about with her little boxes full of adders and crickets and lizards. The lizards generally had their tails broken, for, in order to see whether they were eating, she would lift the lid and let it fall sharply ‘red with surprise’ at their assurance in rushing forwards. ‘And crac - there was nearly always a tail caught.’ So, while the sister taught she was fingering the severed tails and wondering how she could fasten them on again. Then she kept spiders, and when a child cut her finger, ‘ “Come at once,” I would say, “I have some fresh spider web, and I will wrap your finger in it.” ‘ With such strange crafts and passions, for she was never good at her books, she touched the imagination. And of course all this intensity of feeling went, in the convent, to paint some beautiful dramatic picture in which she acted the chief part as the nun who had renounced the world, or the nun who lay dead beneath a heavy black cloth, while the candles flared, and the sisters and pupils cried out in delightful agony. ‘You saw, O Lord God,’ she prayed, ‘that mamma cried, and that it did not affect me!’ for ‘I adored my mother, but with a touching and fervent desire to leave her... to sacrifice her to God’. But a violent escapade which ended in a bad illness finished the religious career that promised so well. She left the convent, and though she still cherished only one ambition, to take the veil, it was decided in
the most casual fashion in a remarkable family council to send her to the Conservatoire. Her mother, an indolent charming woman, with mysterious eyes and heart disease and a passion for music, who was at any rate no ascetic, was in the habit of assembling relations and advisers when any family business had to be transacted. On this occasion there were present a notary, a godfather, an uncle, an aunt, a governess, a friend from the flat above, and a distinguished gentleman, the Due de Moray. Most of these people Sarah had some reason to hate or to love - ‘he had red hair planted in his head like couch grass’, ‘he called me “ma fil” ‘ - ‘he was gentle and kind... and occupied a high place at Court’. They discussed whether, with the 100,000 francs which her father had left her, it would not be best to find her a husband. But upon this she flew into a passion and cried ‘I’ll marry the Bon Dieu... I will be a nun, I will,’ and grew red and confronted her enemies. They murmured and expostulated, and her mother began to talk in a ‘clear drawling voice like the sound of a little waterfall’... Finally the Duc de Moray was bored, and rose to go. ‘Do you know what you ought to do with this child?’ he said. ‘You ought to send her to the Conservatoire.’
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 516