Part 3

Her friends thought she wished to regulate their lives, especially to regulate them in the way that suited her comfort and convenience. What could be more remarkable than the scene Macaulay describes, when she implored, ordered him to refuse his high appointment in India? “I had a most extraordinary scene with Lady Holland. If she had been as young and as handsome as she was thirty years ago, she would have turned my head. She was quite hysterical about my going; paid me such compliments as I cannot repeat; cried; raved; called me dear dear Macaulay. ‘You are sacrificed to your family. I see it all. You are too good to them. They are always making a tool of you; last session about the slaves; and now sending you to India.’ I always do my best to keep my temper with Lady Holland for three reasons: because she is a woman; because she is very unhappy in her health, and in the circumstances of her position; and because she has a real kindness for me. But at last she said something about you. This was too much, and I was beginning to answer her in a voice trembling with anger, when she broke out again: ‘I beg your pardon. Pray forgive me, dear Macaulay. I was very impertinent. I know you will forgive me. Nobody has such a temper as you. I said so to Allen only this morning. I am sure you will bear with my weakness. I shall never see you again’; and she cried, and I cooled; for it would have been to very little purpose to be angry with her. I hear that it is not to me alone that she runs on in this way. She storms at the ministry for letting me go.”

And she was supposed to tyrannize over her household as well as over her guests. The Allen referred to above is a curious figure. Originally recommended to Lord Holland as a traveling physician, he entered the family and remained in it. He was an immense reader, a careful student, and supplied many a Holland House politician with the stuff of oratory. He had opinions of his own, was a violent enemy of all religion, and was gibingly known as “Lady Holland’s atheist.” He did not hesitate to contradict his patroness and some even assert that she was a little afraid of him. At any rate, he was deeply attached to her, remained with her after Lord Holland’s death, and suffered himself in practical matters to be ordered about like a domestic poodle. Moore records an interesting bit of mutual self-confession, when Allen, after years of intimate contact with the deepest thought and brightest wit in Europe, admitted that to keep up conversation during these evenings was “frequently a most heavy task and that if he had followed his own taste and wishes he would long since have given up that mode of life.” And Moore himself adds that the “Holland House sort of existence, though by far the best specimen of its kind going, would appear to me, for any continuance, the most wearisome of all forms of slavery.”

Even Lord Holland himself appeared to his observant visitors to be subject to a domination at times somewhat irksome. “A little after twelve my lady retired and intimated that he ought to do so too,” writes Moore; “but he begged hard for ten minutes more.” Greville says that when some revivalists called on Lord Holland, Lady Holland was with great difficulty persuaded to allow him to go and receive them. “At last she let him be wheeled in, but ordered Edgar and Harold, the two pages, to post themselves outside the door and rush in if they heard Lord Holland scream.” On the great occasion of Macaulay’s going to India, it is recorded that the good-natured husband was goaded into a disciplinary outburst: “Don’t talk such nonsense, my lady! What the devil! Can we tell a gentleman who has a claim upon us that he must lose his only chance for getting an independence in order that he may come and talk to you in an evening?”

I repeat, it is a most curious thing to observe this mob of illustrious and kindly gentlemen handing down to posterity such unanimous abuse of a lady, who, whatever her defects, had done them infinite courtesies. And she is dead and cannot defend herself.

She left a journal, however, which Lord Ilchester has lately edited. And few studies can be more delightful than to turn from the picture painted of her by her friends(?) to her intimate and faithful likeness of herself. The tart, even the boisterous, tongue is indeed not concealed, as when she told a political friend that “I regretted he had not lived in the Middle Ages and given his faith to orthodox points, as he would have made one of the firmest pillars of the church, instead of being a milk and water politician now.” But there are many other things besides tartness and boisterousness.

Unfortunately the Journal stops before the great days of Holland House began. What would we not give for the lady’s account of those conversations with Moore and Ticknor and Macaulay? What for portraits of them and of others such as she well knew how to draw? For her pen was no mean one. It could bite and sting, could emphasize lights and shadows quite as strongly as some of those that etched the figures at her table and the scenes in her drawing-room. You may meet such a type as the following any day in Italy; but only an artist could so render it. “The old Marchesa was also delightful, not to the eye, for she was hideous, nor to the ear, for she squalled, nor to the nose, for she was an Italian; yet, from her unbounded desire of pleasing, the _tout ensemble_ created more agreeable sensations than many more accomplished could have inspired.” Or match this with an English married couple: “The first thing she did was to live apart from him, and keep up a love correspondence with him; hence to the world they appeared enamoured of one another. She is a little mad, and parsimony is her chief turn. She is good-natured and a little clever. Trevor has no judgment and slender talents. His foibles are very harmless and his whole life has been insipidly good. His _ridicules_ are a love of dress coats, _volantes_, and always speaking French. _Au reste_, he is very like other people, only better.” And, as will appear from these two, her portraits, though satirical, are not all unkindly, or at least she sweetens the bitterest of them with a touch of human charity.

Just a few sketches she has of the great men who afterwards became so widely identified with her, enough to increase our ardent desire for more. Thus the following of Wordsworth, interesting in every word for both painter and painted, if somewhat astounding: “Sent an invitation to Wordsworth, one of the Lake poets, to come and dine, or visit us in the evening. 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 conversationist_ in the style of our friend Sharp, than to improve his style of composition.... He holds some opinions on picturesque subjects with which I completely differ, especially as to the effects produced by white houses on the sides of the hills; to my taste they produce a cheerful effect. He, on the contrary, would brown, or even black-work them; he maintained his opinion with a considerable degree of ingenuity.” With which compare the snub administered by Henry Taylor, when she sneered at Wordsworth’s poetry: “Let me beg you to believe, Lady Holland, that this has not been the sort of thing to say about Wordsworth’s poetry for the last ten years.”

But the Journal is far less interesting for its portraits of others than for that of the lady herself, who is seen there complete, and human, and not unlovely.

When she was young, she was beautiful. “I observed a portrait of Lady Holland, painted some thirty years ago,” says Macaulay. “I could have cried to see the change. She must have been a most beautiful woman.”

A mere child, she was married to a man she detested, who perhaps deserved it. “At fifteen, through caprice and folly, I was thrown into the power of one who was a pompous coxcomb, with youth, beauty, and a good disposition, all to be so squandered!” I imagine that Sir Godfrey Webster was a rough English squire of the Western type, fond of beef, beer, hunting, and rural politics, fond also of his wife, after his fashion, but believing that wives should bake, brew, and breed, and utterly intolerant of my lady’s freaks and fancies, of her social ambitions and her sentimental whims. To her he appeared a simple brute. When he “in a paroxysm threw the book I was reading at my head, after having first torn it out of my hands,” I can divine something of how he felt. So perhaps could she; but the incident gave her all the gratification of martyrdom.

“Ah, me!” she writes, “what can please or cheer one who has no hope of happiness in life? Solitude and amusement from external objects is all I hope for; home is the abyss of misery!” Condemned to the exile of a country house, I am sorry to say that she revenged herself by devising cruel tricks against her husband’s aunt, who, however, was most apt at paying back. Later her despair drove her nearly to suicide. “Oftentimes in the gloom of midnight I feel a desire to curtail my grief, and but for an unaccountable shudder that creeps over me, ere this the deed of rashness would be executed. I shall leave nothing behind that I can regret. My children are yet too young to attach me to existence, and Heaven knows I have no close, no tender ties besides. Oh, pardon the audacity of the thought.”

Then Lord Holland appeared and her whole life was altered. With such an early career and with a temper so erratic one would hardly expect that an irregular connection, even though legalized as soon as possible by divorce and marriage, would turn out well. It did. When she first meets her lover, he is “quite delightful.” A number of years later she recognizes that life with him has transformed her character. Every hour she continues “to wonder [sic] and admire the most wonderful union of benevolence, sense, and integrity in the character of the excellent being whose faith is pledged with mine. Either he has imparted some of his goodness to me, or the example of his excellence has drawn out the latent good I had—as certainly I am a better person and a more useful member of society than I was in my years of misery.”

Although she was still young and very beautiful, the ardent suit of other lovers makes no impression on her. She gets rid of them as best she can and consults her husband as to the most effective manner of doing so.

Formerly life was hateful and she longed to be rid of it. “In the bitterness of sorrow I prayed for death. Now I am a coward indeed; a spasm terrifies me, and every memento of the fragile tenure of my bliss strikes a panic through my frame. Oh! my beloved friend, how hast thou by becoming mine endeared the every day occurrences of life! I shrink from nothing but the dread of leaving or of losing thee.” In the lot of an acquaintance who has lost her husband she bewails the most terrible of future possibilities for herself. “How fortunate for her should she never awaken to her wretchedness, but die in the agonies of delirium. Oh! in mercy let such be my close if I am doomed to the—oh! I cannot with calmness suppose the case.”

It is in no cynical spirit, nor with any question of the genuineness of these feelings, but simply as a comment on the ways of this world, that I turn to a passage of Greville, written three months after Lord Holland’s death: “I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is exactly the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland, who seems to be pretty well forgotten. The same talk went merrily round, the laugh rang loudly and frequently, and, but for the black and the mob-cap of the lady, one might have fancied he had never lived or had died half a century ago.”

There has been some question as to whether Lady Holland cared very much for her children by either marriage. Certainly at her death she left her son only two thousand pounds and a large income to a comparative stranger. Yet at the time of her separation from her first husband she sought passionately to retain her daughter, even resorting to the strange and characteristic device of pretending that the child was dead and burying a kid in a coffin in her place.

The Journal, too, is full of passages that come straight from the heart and absolutely prove a sincere, if somewhat erratic maternal affection. I hardly know a stranger mixture of passionate grief and curious self-analysis than the following passage, written on occasion of a child’s death. “There is a sensation in a mother’s breast at the loss of an infant that partakes of the feeling of instinct. It is a species of savage despair. Alas! to lose my pretty infant, just beginning to prattle his little innocent wishes, and imagination so busily aids my grief by tracing what he might have been. In those dreary nights whilst I sat watching his disturbed sleep, I knelt down and poured out to God a fervent prayer for his recovery, and swore that if he were spared me the remainder of my life should be devoted to the exercise of religious duties; that I would believe in the mercy of a God who could listen to and alleviate my woe. Had he lived I should have been a pious enthusiast. I have no superstition in my nature, but from what I then felt it is obvious how the mind may be worked upon when weakened and perplexed by contending passions of fear, hope, and terror.”

It is admitted that Lady Holland was an able housekeeper, and Mr. Ellis Roberts even thinks that the success of her salon was largely owing to the excellence of her table. “It is true the parties were overcrowded, but ... men do not much care how they eat, if what they eat is to their liking.” It is admitted, also, that she was most generous, kind, and thoughtful for her servants. Yet the inveterate prejudice against her manifests itself even here. “In this,” says Greville, “probably selfish considerations principally moved her; it was essential to her comfort to be diligently and zealously served, and she secured by her conduct to them their devoted attachment. It used often to be said in joke that they were very much better off than her guests.” Nevertheless, perhaps there are worse tests of character than the devoted attachment of servants.

On Lady Holland’s intellectual and spiritual life much curious light is thrown by her Journal, when taken in connection with the comments of her friends. Her wayward childhood, her early marriage, her utter lack of systematic education must not be forgotten. “I should be _bien autre chose_ if I had been regularly taught. I never had any method in my pursuits, and I was always too greedy to follow a thing with any _suite_. Till lately [age 26] I did not know the common principles of grammar, and still a boy of ten years old would outdo me.” Yet she was a wide, curious, and intelligent reader, and remembered what she read, as when she located one of Moore’s innumerable stories in an old volume of Fabliaux.

She had her strong opinion on most general subjects. In art she was distinctly of the eighteenth century, as in her view of Wordsworth’s poetry, and her admiration for Guido and the Bolognese painters. “‘St. Peter weeping,’ by _Guido_, reckoned the first of his works and the most faultless picture in Italy.” Nature sometimes moved her deeply, however, as became a contemporary of Byron and Chateaubriand: “The weather was delicious, truly Italian, the night serene, with just enough air to waft the fragrance of the orange-flower, then in blossom. Through the leaves of the trees we caught glimpses of the trembling moonbeams on the glassy surface of the bay; all objects conspired to soothe my mind and the sensations I felt were those of ecstatic rapture. I was so happy that when I reached my bedroom, I dismissed my maid, and sat up the whole night looking from my window upon the sea.”

In religion she was more than liberal, in fact, had no positive beliefs. “Oh, God! chance, nature, or whatever thou art,” is the best she can do in the way of a prayer, though she never encouraged sceptical talk at her table and sometimes snubbed Allen sharply for it. With irreligion went a strong touch of superstition, as so often. “She would not set out on a journey of a Friday for any consideration; dreadfully afraid of thunder, etc.,” “was frightened out of her wits by hearing a dog howl. She was sure that this portended her death, or my lord’s.”

According to her critical guests she was pitifully afraid of death always. “She was in a terrible taking about the cholera,” writes Macaulay; “talked of nothing else; refused to eat any ice, because somebody said that ice was bad for the cholera.” And again, in regard to the same disease: “Lady Holland apparently considers the case so serious that she has taken her conscience out of Allen’s keeping and put it into the hands of Charles Grant.” At any rate, she was morbidly, almost ludicrously anxious about her health; and she herself records that in Spain she selfishly refused to let Allen leave her when she was very ill to attend another invalid friend who greatly needed him. Yet in view of many other passages in her Journal, I cannot think that she really lacked courage in the face of death or of anything else. With her it is never possible to tell what is serious and what is whim. Certain it is that her parting scene was dignified, if not even noble: “She evinced during her illness a very philosophical calmness and resolution, and perfect good-humor, aware that she was dying, and not afraid of death.”

In her main interest, she was preëminently a social being. Greville says that she dreaded solitude above everything, that she “could not live alone for a single minute; she never was alone, and even in her moments of greatest grief it was not in solitude but in society that she sought her consolation.” Her Journal is, I think, sufficient to prove that this is exaggerated. She read and loved to read, and no true lover of books hates solitude. Still she was social, loved men and women and their talk and laughter, loved the sparkle of wit, the snap of repartee, the long interchange of solid argument. Nor was she too particular in the choice of her associates. “There was no person of any position in the world, no matter how frivolous and foolish, whose acquaintance she was not eager to cultivate,” says Greville again. Here, too, her Journal supplies a needed correction, or at least sets things in a fairer and more agreeable light: “A long acquaintance is with me a passport to affection. This does not operate to exclusion of new acquaintances, as I seek them with avidity.” The “passport to affection” is generally recognized. She was loyal in her affections and in her admirations, though sometimes carrying them, like everything else, to the point of oddity, as in her strange worship of Napoleon.

That a person so fond of society should have shown so little tact in it is one of the curious features of her case. But some things throw an interesting light on her brusqueness, her downright rudeness. Here is one brief passage about a woman she met and liked. “If I were to see much of her she might perhaps be benefited, for as nobody can do more mischief to a woman than a woman, so perhaps might one reverse the maxim and say nobody can do more good. A little mild reproof and disapprobation of some of her doctrines might possibly rescue her from the gulf.” Does not that explain a host of oddities, and pleasantly? Who of us likes to be rescued from the gulf by a little mild reproof?

And the woman was nervous, sensitive, imaginative. Society irritates such people even when it fascinates them. Of one guest she writes: “His loud voice and disgusting vanity displeased me so much that I fled for refuge speedily into my own room.” Another bit of most delicate analysis shows how easily the social disillusionment of a sensitive organization might manifest itself in tactless ill-humor. “There is some perverse quality in the mind that seems to take an active pleasure in destroying the amusement it promises to itself. It never fails to baffle my expectations; so sure as I propose to my imagination an agreeable conversation with a person where past experience warrants the hope, so sure am I disappointed. I feel it perpetually, for example, with Dumont; with him I have passed very many cheerful hours. This knowledge tempts me to renew our walks, the consequence is we both yawn.” So clear, so sure is it, that in all human relations the true road to happiness and enjoyment is not to seek them directly for one’s self.

The sense of power, of guiding and controlling others, was doubtless a large element of Lady Holland’s social instinct. “Her love and habit of domination were both unbounded,” writes Greville. To achieve this, to govern the sort of men that gathered about her, she knew that she must study their pursuits. Hence she devoted herself to the details of politics almost as sedulously as did Greville himself. The minuteness of her Spanish Journals, personally of little importance, in this respect, is remarkable. Yet I know of few things more delightfully feminine than her brief comment on ministerial changes. Her friends go out of power, and she observes, “The loss of all interest in public affairs was the natural effect of the change of Administration to me.”