Yet morality, though it may be the crucial difficulty, is by no means the only difficulty that the biographer has to face. There are the white ants of Anjengo—’ a peculiarly voracious breed’, who, not satisfied with devouring the ‘bulk of the old archives ‘ of a town which is at once the birthplace of Eliza and the seat of the pepper industry, have eaten away a much more precious material — the life of Eliza herself. Again and again her conscientious biographers have to admit that the facts are lost. ‘History... is often most tantalizingly silent upon points of real interest.’ The chief actor leaves the stage, often at the crisis of her fate, and in her absence our attention is directed to the antiseptic quality of wood ashes in the treatment of smallpox; to the different natures of the Hooka, the Calloon, and the Kerim Can; to the method, still in vogue, of hunting deer with cheetahs; and to the fact that one of Eliza’s uncles was killed by a sack of caraway seeds falling on his head as he walked up St. Mary-at-Hill in the year 1778. These familiar diversions, which do not perhaps advance the cause of biography, are excusable when the subject is, as Eliza Draper was, an obscure woman, dead almost a century and a half, whose thirty-five years would have been utterly forgotten were it not that for three months in one of them she was loved by Laurence Sterne.
She was loved, but the depredations of time and the white ants leave us in little doubt that the love was on his side, not on hers. If she was anybody’s Eliza (which is by no means certain) she was Thomas Limbrey Sclater’s Eliza. To him she wrote affectionately all her life; to him she sent one of Sterne’s love-letters; and it was of him she thought when the ship was carrying her back to India and away from Sterne for ever. She should have had more sense of the becoming. She should have realized the predicament in which she places posterity. But Eliza was a woman of impulse rather than of reflection. ‘Committing matrimony’, as her sister called it, with Daniel Draper of Bombay at the age of fourteen she ruined her chances for ever. He was thirty-four, had several illegitimate children, was afflicted with the writer’s cramp, and possessed all those virtues which lead officials to the highest promotion and make their wives jump into the arms of Commodore Clarke.
‘... By nature cool, Phlegmatic, and not adorned by Education with any of those pleasing Acquirements which help to fill up the Vacuums of time agreeably, if not usefully, added to which, Methodically formed, in the Extreme, by long habit, and not easily roused into active measures by any Motive Unconnected with his sense of duty.’
Such a man (Eliza wrote of her husband in words which, since her emotions were strong and her grammar weak, we take the liberty of paraphrasing) is quite unfitted to be the husband of a lady entitled to ‘the Appellation of Belle Indian’; who loved society much but solitude more; who read Montaigne and the Spectator-, who was fourth if not third upon the Governor’s invitation list; who wrote letters which some thought worthy of publication; who had been told finally by a friend that nature designed her for the wife of ‘ a very feeling Poet and Philosopher, rather than to a Gentleman of Indépendance and General Talents, and the reason he was pleased to assign to it was, the natural and supposed qualities of my heart, together with an expressive Countenance and a manner capable of doing justice to the tender Passions’.
This ‘ acknowledged Judge of Physiognomy ‘ was, we may guess, no less a person than the great Mr. Sterne. Eliza met him at the house of Mrs. James in Gerrard Street in the year 1767. Draper’s increasing cramp had the somewhat incongruous effect of bringing them together. Having tried the English spas without success, Draper returned to Bombay and Eliza was left in London to continue the conversation with Sterne. From the Journal to Eliza we can judge fairly accurately what they talked about. Eliza was the most charming of women, Sterne the most passionate of men. Life was cruel, Mrs. Sterne intolerable, early marriages deplorable, Bombay distant, and husbands exacting. The only happiness to mingle thoughts and tears, to share ecstasies and exchange portraits, and pray for some miracle, such as the simultaneous deaths of Elizabeth Sterne and Daniel Draper, which might unite them eternally in the future. But though this was undoubtedly what they said, it is no such easy matter to be certain what they meant. Sterne was fifty-four, and Eliza twenty-two. Sterne was at the height of his fame, and Eliza at the height not of her beauty, which was little, but of her charm, which was great. But Sterne was engaged in writing The Sentimental Journey, and Eliza must sometimes have felt that though it was most wonderful and flattering to have a celebrated author sitting by her bedside when she fell ill, and reading her letters aloud to the ladies and gentlemen of the highest rank, and displaying her picture, and buying ten handsome brass screws for her cabin, and running her errands round London, still he was fifty-four, had a dreadful cough, and sometimes, she noticed, looked out of the window in a very curious way. No doubt he was thinking about his writing. He assured her that he found her of the very greatest help. And he told her that he had brought her name and picture into his work, ‘where’, he said, ‘they will remain when you and I are at rest’; and he went on to write an elegy upon her, and no doubt worked himself up into one of those accesses of emotion which any woman would have given her eyes to inspire, yet lying ill in bed Eliza found them a little fatiguing, and could not help thinking that Thomas Limbrey Sclater, who was not in the least likely to become immortal, was a great deal more to her taste than Laurence Sterne. Thus, if we must censure Eliza, it is not for being in love with Sterne, but for not being in love with him. She let him write her the letters of a lover and propose to her the rights of a husband. But when she reached India she had almost forgotten him, and his death recalled only ‘ the mild generous good Yorick ‘ whose picture hung, not above her heart, but over her writing-table.
Arrived in India with eleven years of life before her, the provoking creature proceeded to live them as if she did not care a straw for those ‘Annotators and Explainers’ who would, Sterne said, busy themselves in after ages with their names. She gave herself up to trivial interests and nameless captains; to sitting till three in the morning upon a ‘cool Terrasse’; to hunting antelopes with leopards; to driving down the streets of Tellicherry with an escort of armed Sepoys; to playing with her children and pouring out her soul in long, long letters to Mr. Sclater and Mrs. James; to that petty process of living, in short, which is of such inexplicable interest to others engaged in the same pursuit. It is all very obscure and highly conjectural. She was very happy at Tellicherry in the year 1769 and very unhappy in the year 1770. She was always being happy and then unhappy and blaming herself and hoping that her daughter would be a better woman than her mother. Yet Eliza did not think altogether badly of herself. It was her complexion that was to blame, and the ‘happy flexibility’ of her temper. Vain, charming, gifted, sympathetic, her relations with her husband grew steadily more and more desperate. At last, when it was quite certain that Draper loved Leeds, her maid, and neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday did he say that word ‘sympathetick of regret’ which ‘would have saved me the perilous adventure’, Eliza either jumped from her window into a boat or was otherwise conveyed to the flagship of Sir John Clarke and thence to her uncle’s house at Masulipatam. This time, without a doubt, her biographers regretfully conclude, ‘Eliza was “lost”’. But Eliza was not in the least of that opinion herself. She turned up imperturbably in Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, ‘which shows that she had considerable social resources’; but there, alas, proceeded to fall in love with the Abbé Raynal. Was she incorrigible or was he, perhaps like others of his countrymen, apt to exaggerate? The terms in which he addressed Anjengo would lead one to suspect the latter. But death, with infinite discretion, spares us the inquiry. Eliza died at the age of thirty-five, and some unknown friend raised a monument to her memory in Bristol Cathedral with the figures of Genius and Benevolence on either side and a bird in the act of feeding its young. So after all somebody liked Eliza, and it is as certain as anything can be that a woman with such a tombstone was moving in the highest circles of Bristol socie
ty at the time of her death.
Horace Walpole
ONE hundred and ten letters by Horace Walpole are here printed by Dr. Toynbee for the first time. These, together with twenty-three now printed in full, new matter from hitherto unpublished material, and Dr. Toynbee’s notes, make up two volumes of rare delight. If the two volumes were ten we should still urge Dr. Toynbee to fresh researches; we should still welcome the discovery of a large chest put away in some old country house and stuffed to the brim with Walpole’s letters. Although there is nothing in the new letters of surpassing brilliance, nothing that draws a new line on the familiar face, there is once more, and for too short a time, the peculiar and unmistakable pleasure of Walpole’s society. He does not need to be brilliant; he does not need to be indiscreet; let him draw up to the table, take the pen in his gouty fingers, and write — anything, everything, so long as he continues to write. These last letters, swept up from many different sources with intervals between them and lacking continuity, are yet neither trivial nor disconnected. We fall into step at once. We take our delightful promenade through the greater part of the eighteenth century. We see in passing many old friends. It is as entertaining as ever. The first solemn chimes of the nineteenth century, which mean that Horace Walpole must retire, are as vexatious to us as the clock that strikes and sends a child complaining up to bed.
Perhaps it is fanciful to detect the charm of the mature Walpole in ‘My first letter to my mother’, with which the book opens: ‘ Dear Mama, I hop you are wall and I am very wall and I hop papa is wall... and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruataurs ar all wall’. Yet this is an engaging letter, as the dark-eyed little boy in the miniature is a charming little boy; and there can be no doubt that Walpole far sooner than most children knew his own mind and could overcome the difficulties of spelling. There was never a transition stage of awkward immaturity when he said more than he meant, or less than he meant, or what he did not mean. At the age of twenty-three he appears in Rome a complete man of the world, and so much his own master that he can already quiz the great ladies who are seeing the sights, execute commissions for fans and snuffboxes, exchange compliments with learned men, keep his own mind admirably free from enthusiasm, and end a letter:
Good-night, child, I am in a violent hurry. Oh, Porto Bello, the delightful news! Corradini is certainly to be Pope, and soon. Next post I shall probably be able to tell you he certainly is not.
The author of that sentence is already completely equipped for his part. He has broken the back of the stubborn English tongue; for ever more it is going to run his errands, carry his light burdens, do his behests; he has at his disposal an indefatigable slave. More than that, he has already taken up his position, sees the spectacle from his own angle, and for close on eighty years there will he stand, witty, malicious, observant, detached, the liveliest of gossips, the most alert of friends. The son of a Prime Minister endowed with a handsome sinecure, a position of some sort was assured him had he been both dunce and dullard. But Horace Walpole was not a dullard, and he was much more than the son of a Prime Minister. He stood out against his hereditary doom with a resolution which commands our respect, though it has caused him to be disparaged since, as no doubt it raised a laugh against him at the time. He would not drink; he would not dice; he would not be a country gentleman; he would not be a politician. He would, in short, be nothing save what it pleased him to be.
On the whole it pleased him best to be a gentleman, for there is no reason why a gentleman should not write the wittiest letters in the world, provided that he does it carelessly, and has for correspondents the most exalted and the most accomplished of his time. The chief characteristic of this class he had acquired very young, perhaps at the cost of some labour — even, it is possible, of some renunciation. ‘Good-night, child, I am in a violent hurry.’ Whatever pains his letter had cost him, it was essential to pass it off as the merest trifle, something dashed down while he waited for the rain to stop — something, as the phrasing shows, spontaneous, careless, but spoken naturally in a tone of the highest breeding. He was careful to repeat the boast that he was in a violent hurry whenever he wrote anything. As for rhapsody of emotion or profundity of learning, those qualities he left to the professional writers who had only their brains to live by. Moreover, it is permissible for the amateur to spend his time over problems which fascinated Walpole, though no man of sense could waste a thought upon them. Since no one, himself least of all, took him seriously, he could devote several pages to the discussion of that difficult and vexed question — the age at which Lady Desmond died. Was she really 163, and could it be possible that she had danced with Richard the Third? For some reason these questions stirred his imagination. His eagerness to know the exact condition of Queen Catherine Parr’s corpse, when it was dug up and examined, would seem excessive — save indeed that the lady was of the highest rank. For it is not possible to deny that he was a snob, and of the determined breed whose mothers have been Shorters while their fathers, though not of noble birth, have been exalted by their abilities to familiar converse with the great. Yet once that dart is levelled, no other can find a lodgment. It is not easy to call him dilettante or gossip, poetaster or dandy, when before these charges are out of your mouth the culprit has owned them of his own accord and gone out of his way to pronounce his sentence:
Good God! Sir, what am I that I should be offended at, or above, criticism or correction? I do not know who ought to be — I am sure no author. I am a private man of no consequence, and at best an author of very moderate abilities.
Even in matters of taste, upon which he had spent most of his life and a large part of his fortune, he was open to correction by people possessed of greater learning than he could claim. He was nothing but a private gentleman.
The reader will perceive that the habit of understatement is not only the essence of good breeding, but also a tool of great value in the hand of a writer. An author who knows no more than other people, who has no dignity to keep up, no convictions to enforce, no philosophy to expound, can say what he likes and think what he chooses. No one need attend to him. But if, in addition, by a mere stroke of luck, he possesses the wittiest of pens and the most observant of eyes, if he knows everybody worth knowing and sees everything worth seeing, we shall of course get every word he writes by heart. Since, however, writers should be serious, we shall in revenge allow him very little credit for his performance. It is the fashion to say that Walpole was so amusing because he was so frivolous, so witty because he was so heartless. He was certainly very much put out when old Madame du Deffand fell in love with him, and thought that at her age she could afford to talk about it openly. ‘Dès le moment que je cessai d’être jeune, j’ai eu une peur horrible de devenir un vieillard ridicule’, he wrote to her; and she replied, ‘Vos craintes sur le ridicule sont des terreurs paniques, mais on ne guérit point de la peur; je n’ai point vu une semblable faiblesse’. He was terribly afraid of ridicule, and yet the old lady, whose passion he had snubbed, showed considerable penetration when she spoke of ‘l’extrême vérité de votre caractère’. Understatement long persisted in, partly from motives of taste and propriety and partly from fear of ridicule, had disciplined Walpole’s emotions so that they scarcely dared show themselves above ground; yet what there is of them, as sometimes happens with emotions repressed rather than exploited, rings startlingly true. ‘... he loved me and I did not think he did ‘, he wrote of his quarrel with Gray, when Gray was dead. But as for his heart, let that rest in peace; there is some indecency in prying into it, and he would certainly prefer that we should credit him with none at all than allow him a grain too much. His brain is our affair.
And yet here once more shall we not be guilty of some credulity if we accept him entirely at his own estimate? The affectation of indifference, the pose of amateurishness, were common foibles at that time among men of birth whose brains could not abstain altogether from the inkpot. But perhaps there were moments when Walpole wished
that his father’s name had been Shorter as well as his mother’s, and that fate had required him to use pen and paper in earnest and not merely provide them, at a handsome salary, for the use of the young men at the Treasury. At any rate his warmest praises in the present volume are not for Lady Di’s illustrations in ‘Sut water’ to the Mysterious Mother, nor even for Mrs. Damer’s model of ‘a shock dog in wax’, but for the plays of Shakespeare. ‘ Moi, je me ferais brûler pour la primauté de Shakespeare.’ Admiring the French and owing much to them, still when it comes to tragedy what are Voltaire and Racine and Corneille, compared with Shakespeare? How did Voltaire dare criticize Shakespeare? ‘Grossly ignorant and tasteless’ was he not to see that the phrase ‘ a bare bodkin ‘ is as sublime in one way as the simplicity of Lady Percy’s speech is sublime in another? ‘ I had rather have written the two speeches of Lady Percy in the second part of Henry IV than all Voltaire.... But my enthusiasm for Shakespeare runs away with me.’ That is, indeed, an unwonted spectacle. But perhaps young Mr. Jephson, the playwright, owed all this talk about Shakespeare and the English language ‘far more energie, and more sonorous too, than the French’, and these interesting speculations about ‘a novel diction’, ‘a very new and peculiar style ‘ which might have amazing effect, ‘ by fixing on some region of whose language we have little or no idea ‘ — perhaps Mr. Jephson drew all this down upon himself because the old dandy and aristocrat did for the time being envy young Mr. Jephson, who could set himself seriously to the task of writing and need not, since his name was Jephson, scribble off a tragedy ‘in a violent hurry’.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 489
