Chapter 3 LADY DOROTHY NEVILL

AN OPEN LETTER

Dear Lady Burghclere,

When we met for the first time after the death of our friend, you desired me to produce what you were kind enough to call "one of my portraits." But the art of the portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no "portrait," but a few leaves torn out of a painter-writer's sketch-book.

The existence of the three published volumes does, after all, not preclude a more intimate study, because they are confessedly exterior. They represent what she saw and heard, not what others perceived in her. In the first place, they are very much better written than she would have written them herself. I must dwell presently on the curious fact that, with all her wit, she possessed no power of sustained literary expression. Her Memoirs were composed, as you know, by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who is a practised writer and not otherwise could they have been given to the public. On this point her own evidence is explicit. She wrote to me, in all the excitement of the success of the volume of 1906: "The Press has been wonderfully good to my little efforts, but to Ralph the better part is due, as, out of the tangled remnants of my brain, he extracted these old anecdotes of my early years." This is as bravely characteristic of her modesty as it is of her candour, but I think it shows that there is still room for some record of the more intimate features of her charming and elusive character. I take up my pencil, but with little hope of success, since no more formidable task could be set me. I will at least try to be, as she would have scorned me for not being, sincere.

My friendship with Lady Dorothy Nevill occupied more than a quarter of a century. I met her first in the house of Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller in the winter of 1887, soon after their return from Ireland. She had done me the great honour of desiring that I should be invited to meet her. She had known my venerable relative, the zoologist, Thomas Bell of Selborne, and she had corresponded in years long past, about entomology, with my father. We talked together on that first occasion for hours, and it seems to me that I was lifted, without preliminaries, into her intimacy. From that afternoon, until I drank tea with her for the last time, ten days before her death, the precious link was never loosened.

In 1887, her great social popularity had not begun. She was, I now know, already near sixty, but it never occurred to me to consider her age. She possessed a curious static quality, a perennial youthfulness. Every one must have observed how like Watts' picture of her at twenty she still was at eighty-six. This was not preserved by any arts or fictile graces. She rather affected, prematurely, the dress and appearance of an elderly woman. I remember her as always the same, very small and neat, very pretty with her chiselled nose, the fair oval of her features, the slightly ironic, slightly meditative smile, the fascinating colour of the steady eyes, beautifully set in the head, with the eyebrows rather lifted as in a perpetual amusement of curiosity. Her head, slightly sunken into the shoulders, was often poised a little sideways, like a bird's that contemplates a hemp-seed. She had no quick movements, no gestures; she held herself very still. It always appeared to me that, in face of her indomitable energy and love of observation, this was an unconscious economy of force. It gave her a very peculiar aspect; I remember once frivolously saying to her that she looked as though she were going to "pounce" at me; but she never pounced. When she had to move, she rose energetically and moved with determination, but she never wasted a movement. Her physical strength-and she such a tiny creature-seemed to be wonderful. She was seldom unwell, although, like most very healthy people, she bewailed herself with exaggerated lamentations whenever anything was the matter with her. But even on these occasions she defied what she called "coddling." Once I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort of incongruity very characteristic of her, "Oh! none of your hot bottles for me!" In her last hours of consciousness she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the flame behind screens because she threatened to get out of bed and put it out. Her marvellous physical force has to be insisted on, for it was the very basis of her character.

Her humorous petulance, her little sharp changes of voice, the malice of her downcast eyes, the calmness of her demure and easy smile-how is any impression to be given of things so fugitive? Her life, which had not been without its troubles and anxieties, became one of prolonged and intense enjoyment. I think that this was the main reason of the delight which her company gave to almost every one. She was like a household blaze upon a rainy day, one stretched out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against the charge of being amiable. "It would be horrid to be amiable," she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a touch of sharpness about her. She was amused once because I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and half sour. "Oh! any stupid woman can be sweet," she said, "it's often another name for imbecile."

She had curious little prejudices and antipathies. I never fathomed the reason of her fantastic horror of the feasts of the Church, particularly of Christmas. She always became curiously agitated as the month of December waned. In her notes she inveighed, in quaint alarm, against the impending "Christmas pains and penalties." I think she disliked the disturbance of social arrangements which these festivals entailed. But there was more than that. She was certainly a little superstitious, in a mocking, eighteenth-century sort of way, as Madame du Deffand might have been. She constantly said, and still more frequently wrote, "D.V." after any project, even of the most frivolous kind. The idea was that one should be polite all round, in case of any contingency. When she was in the Riviera, she was much interested to hear that the Prince of Monaco had built and endowed a handsome church at Monte Carlo. "Very clever of him," she said, "for you never can tell."

Lady Dorothy's entire absence of affectation was eminently attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though China fell. Her strange little activities, her needlework, her paperwork, her collections, were the wonder of everybody, but she did not require approval; she adopted them, in the light of day, for her own amusement. She never pushed her peculiarities on the notice of visitors, but, at the same time, if discovered in the act of some incredible industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her was the oddity of the students' life; she expatiated to me on their beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of late years, I was exhorted to send her picture post-cards from out-of-the-way places, and "Remember that I like vulgar ones best," she added imperturbably. The story is perhaps known to you of how, in a circle of superfine ladies, the conversation turned to food, and the company outdid one another in protestations of delicacy. This one could only touch a little fruit, and that one was practically confined to a cup of tea. Lady Dorothy, who had remained silent and detached, was appealed to as to her opinion. In a sort of loud cackling-a voice she sometimes surprisingly adopted-she replied, "Oh, give me a blow-out of tripe and onions!" to the confusion of the précieuses. She had a wholesome respect for food, quite orthodox and old-fashioned, although I think she ate rather markedly little. But she liked that little good. She wrote to me once from Cannes, "This is not an intellectual place, but then the body rejoices in the cooking, and thanks God for that." She liked to experiment in foods, and her guests sometimes underwent strange surprises. One day she persuaded old Lord Wharncliffe, who was a great friend of hers, to send her a basket of guinea-pig, and she entertained a very distinguished company on a fricassee of this unusual game. She refused to say what the dish was until every one had heartily partaken, and then Mr. George Russell turned suddenly pale and fled from the room. "Nothing but fancy," remarked the hostess, composedly. When several years ago there was a proposal that we should feed upon horse-flesh, and a purveyor of that dainty opened a shop in Mayfair, Lady Dorothy was one of the first of his customers. She sallied forth in person, followed by a footman with a basket, and bought a joint in the presence of a jeering populace.

She had complete courage and absolute tolerance. Sometimes she pretended to be timid or fanatical, but that was only her fun. Her toleration and courage would have given her a foremost place among philanthropists or social reformers, if her tendencies had been humanitarian. She might have been another Elizabeth Fry, another Florence Nightingale. But she had no impulse whatever towards active benevolence, nor any interest in masses of men and women. And, above all, she was not an actor, but a spectator in life, and she evaded, often with droll agility, all the efforts which people made to drag her into propagandas of various kinds. She listened to what they had to say, and she begged for the particulars of specially awful examples of the abuses they set out to remedy. She was all sympathy and interest, and the propagandist started with this glittering ally in tow; but he turned, and where was she? She had slipped off, and was in contemplation of some other scheme of experience.

She described her life to me, in 1901, as a "treadmill of friendship, perpetually on the go"; and later she wrote: "I am hampered by perpetual outbursts of hospitality in every shape." Life was a spectacle to her, and society a congeries of little guignols, at all of which she would fain be seated, in a front stall. If she complained that hospitality "hampered" her, it was not that it interfered with any occupation or duty, but simply that she could not eat luncheon at three different houses at once. I remember being greatly amused when I congratulated her on having enjoyed some eminent public funeral, by her replying, grudgingly: "Yes-but I lost another most interesting ceremony through its being at the same hour." She grumbled: "People are tugging me to go and see things," not from any shyness of the hermit or reluctance to leave her home, but simply because she would gladly have yielded to them all. "Such a nuisance one can't be in two places at once, like a bird!" she remarked to me.

In this relation, her attitude to country life was droll. After long indulgence in her amazing social energy in London, she would suddenly become tired. The phenomenon never ceased to surprise her; she could not recollect that she had been tired before, and this must be the end of all things. She would fly to the country; to Dorsetshire, to Norfolk, to Haslemere, to what she called "the soberness of Ascot." Then would come letters describing the bliss of rural calm. "Here I am! Just in time to save my life. For the future, no clothes and early hours." That lasted a very short while. Then a letter signed "Your recluse, D.N.," would show the dawn of a return to nature. Then boutades of increasing vehemence would mark the rising impatience. Sept 12: "How dreadful it is that the country is so full of ladies." Sept. 15: "I am surrounded by tall women and short women, all very tiresome." Sept. 20: "So dull here, except for one pleasant episode of a drunken housemaid." Sept. 23: "Oh! I am so longing for the flesh-pots of dear dirty old London"; and then one knew that her return to Charles Street would not be long delayed. She was very fond indeed of country life, for a short time, and she was interested in gardens, but she really preferred streets. "Eridge is such a paradise-especially the quadrupeds," she once wrote to me from a house in which she found peculiar happiness. But she liked bipeds best.

However one may postpone the question, sooner or later it is necessary to consider the quality of Lady Dorothy Nevill's wit, since all things converge in her to that. But her wit is so difficult to define that it is not surprising that one avoids, as long as possible, coming actually to grips with it. We may lay the foundation of a formula, perhaps, by saying that it was a compound of solid good sense and an almost reckless whimsicality of speech. The curious thing about it was that it was not markedly intellectual, and still less literary. It had not the finish of such wit as is preserved in anthologies of humour. Every one who enjoyed the conversation of Lady Dorothy must have perceived with annoyance how little he could take away with him. Her phrases did not often recur to please that inward ear, "which is the bliss of solitude." What she said seemed at the time to be eminently right and sane; it was exhilarating to a high degree; it was lighted up by merriment, and piquancy, and salt; but it was the result of a kind of magic which needed the wand of the magician; it could not be reproduced by an imitator. It is very unfortunate, but the fact has to be faced. When we tell our grandchildren that Lady Dorothy Nevill was the finest female wit of her age, they will ask us for examples of her talent, and we shall have very few to give.

She liked to discuss people better than books or politics or principles, although she never shrank from these. But it was what she said about human beings that kept her interlocutors hanging on her lips. She made extraordinarily searching strictures on persons, without malice, but without nonsense of any kind. Her own favourites were treated with reserve in this respect: it was as though they were put in a pen by themselves, not to be criticised so long as they remained in favour; and she was not capricious, was, on the contrary, conspicuously loyal. But they always had the impression that it was only by special licence that they escaped the criticism that every one else was subjected to. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a stringent observer, and no respecter of persons. She carried a bow, and shot at folly as it flew. But I particularly wish to insist on the fact that her arrows, though they were feathered, were not poisoned.

Light was thrown on the nature of Lady Dorothy's wit by her correspondence. She could in no accepted sense be called a good letter-writer, although every now and then brilliantly amusing phrases occurred in her letters. I doubt whether she ever wrote one complete epistle; her correspondence consisted of tumultuous, reckless, sometimes extremely confused and incorrect notes, which, however, repeated-for those who knew how to interpret her language-the characteristics of her talk. She took no pains with her letters, and was under no illusion about their epistolary value. In fact, she was far too conscious of their lack of form, and would sign them, "Your incompetent old friend"; there was generally some apology for "this ill-written nonsense," or "what stuff this is, not worth your reading!" She once wrote to me: "I should like to tell you all about it, but alas! old Horace Walpole's talent has not descended on me." Unfortunately, that was true; so far as literary expression and the construction of sentences went, it had not. Her correspondence could never be given to the world, because it would need to be so much revised and expanded and smoothed out that it would no longer be hers at all.

Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to receive, because they gave the person to whom they were addressed a reflection of the writer's mood at the moment. They were ardent and personal, in their torrent of broken sentences, initials, mis-spelt names and nouns that had dropped their verbs. They were not so good as her talk, but they were like enough to it to be highly stimulating and entertaining; and in the course of them phrases would be struck out, like sparks from flint, which were nearly as good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to say. She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks of time-saving; always put "I" for "one," and "x" for "cross," a word which she, who was never cross, loved to use. "I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers," she would write, or "I am afraid my last letter was rather x."

Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she "se moquait de l'orthographie comme une chose méprisable." The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century. She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspondence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her friends to interpret by divination. From a withering denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts Mr. John Burns and "that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom I like." From about 1899 to 1903, I think that Lord Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts. In her letters of those years the references to him are incessant, but when he is not "the F.M." and "our C.C.," she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from "Wollesley" to "Walsey." When she wrote to me of the pleasure she had had in meeting "the Abbot Guaschet," it took me a moment to recognise the author of English Monastic Life. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying, "Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a bright specimen-like you!" When she made arrangements to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she frequently did, she always wrote it "the Lord's House," as though it were a conventicle.

One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds of her notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast between the general tone of them and the real disposition of their writer. Lady Dorothy Nevill in person was placid, indulgent, and calm; she never raised her voice, or challenged an opinion, or asserted her individuality. She played, very consistently, her part of the amused and attentive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her letters she pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to seem, passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget an engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and this is how she apologises:-

"To think that every hour since you said you would come I have repeated to myself-Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then after all to go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and swear on the doorstep, and you will never come again now, really. No punishment here or hereafter will be too much for me. Lead me to the Red Hill Asylum, and leave me there."

This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was not less vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me of an anonymous letter which he once received, to which she afterwards pleaded guilty. A cow used to be kept at the back of Lansdowne House, and the animal, no doubt feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at all sorts of hours. The letter, which was supposed to voice the complaint of the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the broadest Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript: "Dang 'un, there 'ee goes again!" As a matter of fact, her letters, about which she had no species of vanity or self-consciousness, were to her merely instruments of friendship. There was an odd mingling of affection and stiffness in them. She marshalled her acquaintances with them, and almost invariably they were concerned with arrangements for meeting or explanations of absence. In my own experience, I must add that she made an exception when her friends were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them the gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled with her experiences as the neighbour of a famous African magnate, and with the remark, "Mrs. --," a London fine lady of repute, "has been here, and has scraped the whole inside out of Mr. --, and gone her way rejoicing." Nor did she spare the correspondent himself:-

"Old Dr. -- has been here, and tells me he admires you very much; but I believe he has lost his memory, and he never had good taste at any time."

This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its bosom. Of a very notorious individual she wrote to me:-

"I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I had to wait 100 years, but everything is possible in the best of worlds, and he was very satisfactory at last." Satisfactory! No word could be more characteristic on the pen of Lady Dorothy. To be "satisfactory," whether you were the President of the French Republic or Lord Wolseley or the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon by Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be "satisfactory" if he did his job thoroughly. The only entirely unsatisfactory people were those who were insipid, conventional, and empty. "The first principle of society should be to extinguish the bores," she once said. I remember going with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being struck with a remark which she made, not because it was important, but because it was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves which she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of Indian cow. "What a bore for the wolves to have to live opposite a cow!" and then, as if talking to herself, "I do hate a ruminant!"

Her relations to literature, art, and science were spectacular also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, always on the side of those things against the Philistines, but not affecting special knowledge herself. She was something of a virtuoso. She once said, "I have a passion for reading, but on subjects which nobody else will touch," and this indicated the independence of her mind. She read to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for experience. When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of producing the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was then an object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English reader. Lady Dorothy had already read L'Assommoir, and had not shrunk from it; so I ventured to tell her of La Terre, which was just appearing. She wrote to me about it: "I have been reading Zola. He takes the varnish off rural life, I must say. Oh! these horrid demons of Frenchmen know how to write. Even the most disgusting things they know how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of the inhabitants in their cups." She told me later-for we followed our Zola to Lourdes and Paris-that some young Oxford prig saw La Bête Humaine lying on the table at Charles Street, and remarked that Lady Dorothy could surely not be aware that that was "no book for a lady." She said, "I told him it was just the book for me!"

She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, with a renewal of sentiment. "I am dedicating my leisure hours to Endymion. What a charm after the beef and mutton of ordinary novels!" She gradually developed a cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her repentance after his death, she wrote: "I never hear enough about that genius Swinburne! My heart warms when I think of him and read his poems." I think she was very much annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles Street. When Verlaine was in England, to deliver a lecture, in 1894, Lady Dorothy was insistent that, as I was seeing him frequently, I should bring the author of Parallelement to visit her. She said-I think under some illusion-"Verlaine is one of my pet poets, though," she added, "not of this world." I was obliged to tell her that neither Verlaine's clothes, nor his person, nor his habits, admitted of his being presented in Mayfair, and that, indeed, it was difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where he could be at home. She then said: "Why can't you take me to see him in this eating-house?" I had to explain that of the alternatives that was really the least possible. She was not pleased.

Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the features of our wonderful fairy friend. However I may sharpen the pencil, the line it makes is still too heavy. I feel that these anecdotes seem to belie her exquisite refinement, the rapidity and delicacy of her mental movement. To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth. Above all, it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her emotional nature. Lady Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of gravity nor of pathos; she was totally devoid of sentimentality. This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse to believe that the author of so many pungent observations and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When this was once questioned in company, one who knew her well replied: "Ah! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a grain of mustard-seed!" But her kindliness was shown, with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly correct to say that she had the genius of friendship, because that supposes a certain initiative and action which were foreign to Lady Dorothy's habits. But she possessed, to a high degree, the genius of comradeship. She held the reins very tightly, and she let no one escape whom she wished to retain. She took immense pains to preserve her friendships, and indeed became, dear creature, a little bit tyrannical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively emphatic. She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with "Oh, you demon!" or complain of "total and terrible neglect of an old friend; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of your misdeeds!" She was ingenious in reproach: "I cannot afford to waste penny after penny, and no assets forthcoming," or "I have only two correspondents, and one of them is a traitor; I therefore cease to write to you for ever!" This might sound formidable, but it was only one of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be followed next day by the most placable of notelets.

Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevolences, which often took somewhat the form of voyages of discovery. Among these her weekly excursion to the London Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the "pore dear things" appreciated her listening smile and sympathetic worldliness much more than they would have done the admonitions of a more conscious philanthropist.

And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines forth. She followed all that her friends did, everything that happened to those who were close to them. She liked always to receive the tribute of what she called my "literary efforts," and was ruthlessly sharp in observing announcements of them: "Publishing again, and of course no copy for poor old me," when not a volume had yet left the binders. She took up absurd little phrases with delightful camaraderie; I have forgotten why at one time she took to signing herself "Your Koh-i-Noor," and wrote: "If I can hope to be the Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse's party, I shall be sure to come on Monday." One might go on indefinitely reviving these memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality. But I close on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure will affect you. She had been a little tyrannical, as usual, and perhaps thought the tone of her persiflage rather excessive; a few hours later came a second note, which began: "You have made my life happier for me these last years-you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred." From her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form, and who prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker, this was worth all the protestations of some more ebullient being. And there, dear Lady Burghclere, I must leave this poor sketch for such approval as you can bring yourself to give it.

Very faithfully yours,

EDMUND GOSSE.

January 1914.