The essays of virginia w.., p.14
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 14
‘The party then broke up; and no one from amongst it ever asked, or wished for its repetition.’fn45
Cowper and Lady Austen
VW’s essay in the N&A, 21 September, and the NYHT, 22 September 1929, (Kp4 C314) was later revised for inclusion in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). The reader is referred here, where the revised version, together with variants in the form of endnotes, is printed in its place as part of CR2.
Beau Brummellfn1
When Cowper in the seclusion of Olney was roused to anger by the thought of the Duchess of Devonshire and predicted a time when ‘instead of a girdle there will be a rent, and instead of beauty, baldness’fn2 he was acknowledging the power of the lady whom he thought so despicable. Why otherwise should she haunt the damp solitude of Olney? Why should the rustle of her silken skirts trouble those gloomy meditations? Undoubtedly the Duchess was a good haunter. Long after those words were written when she was dead and buried beneath a tinsel coronet, her ghost mounted the stairs of a very different dwelling place. An old man was sitting in his arm chair at Caen. The door opened and the servant announced ‘The Duchess of Devonshire.’fn3 Beau Brummell at once rose, went to the door and made a bow that would have graced the Court of St James’s. Only unfortunately there was no one there. The cold air blew up the staircase of the Inn. The Duchess was long dead, and Beau Brummell in his old age and imbecility was dreaming that he was back in London again giving a party. Cowper’s curse had come true for both of them. The Duchess lay in her shroud, and Brummell whose clothes had been the envy of kings had now only one pair of much mended trousers, which he hid as best he could under a tattered cloak. As for his hair that had been shaven by order of the doctor.
But though Cowper’s sour predictions had thus come to pass both the Duchess and the dandy might claim that they had had their day. They had been great figures in their time. Of the two perhaps Brummell might boast the more miraculous career. He had no advantage of birth and but little of fortune. His grandfather had let rooms in St James’s Street. He had only a moderate capital of thirty thousand pounds to begin with and his beauty, of figure rather than of face, was marred by a broken nose. Yet without a single noble, important or valuable action to his credit he cuts a figure; he stands for a symbol; his ghost walks among us still.
The reason for this eminence is now a little difficult to determine. Skill of hand and nicety of judgment were his, of course, otherwise he would not have brought the art of tying neck cloths to perfection. The story is perhaps too well known – how drawing his head back he sunk his chin down so that the cloth wrinkled in perfect symmetry, or if one wrinkle went amiss the cloth was thrown into a basket and the attempt renewed while the Prince of Wales sat watching hour after hour. Yet skill of hand and nicety of judgment were not enough. Brummell owed his ascendency to some curious combination of wit, of taste, of insolence, of independence – for he was never a toady – which it were too heavy handed to call a philosophy of life but served the purpose. At any rate, ever since he was the most popular boy at Eton coolly jesting when they were for throwing a bargee into the river, ‘My good fellows, don’t send him into the river; the man is evidently in a high state of perspiration, and it almost amounts to a certainty that he will catch cold,’fn4 he floated buoyantly and gaily and without apparent effort to the top of whatever society he found himself among. Even when he was a captain in the Tenth Hussars and so scandalously inattentive to duty that he only knew his troop by ‘the very large blue nose’fn5 of one of the men, he was liked and tolerated. When he resigned his commission, for the regiment was to be sent to Manchester – ‘I really could not go – think, your Royal Highness, Manchester!’fn6 – he had only to set up house in Chesterfield Street to become the head of the most jealous and exclusive society of his time. For example, he was at Almacks one night talking to Lord ——. The Duchess of —— was there, escorting her young daughter, Lady Louisa. The Duchess caught sight of Mr Brummell and at once warned her daughter that if that gentleman near the door came and spoke to them she was to be careful to impress him favourably, ‘for,’ and she sank her voice to a whisper, ‘he is the celebrated Mr Brummell.’fn7
Lady Louisa might well have wondered why a Mr Brummell was celebrated, and why a Duke’s daughter need take care to impress a Mr Brummell. And then directly he began to move towards them the reason of her mother’s warning became apparent. The grace of his carriage was so astonishing; his bows were so exquisite. Everybody looked overdressed or badly dressed, – some looked positively dirty beside him. His clothes seemed to melt into each other with the perfection of their cut and the quiet harmony of their colour. Without a single point of emphasis everything was distinguished – from his bow to the way he opened his snuff box with his left hand invariably. He was the personification of freshness and cleanliness and order. One could well believe that he had his chair brought into his dressing room and was deposited at Almacks without letting a puff of wind disturb his curls or a spot of mud stain his shoes.
When he actually spoke to her Lady Louisa would be at first enchanted – no one possessed the art of pleasing in a higher degree – and then she would be puzzled. It was quite possible that before the evening was out he would ask her to marry him, and yet his manner of doing it was such that the most ingenuous debutante could not believe that he meant it seriously. His odd grey eyes seemed to contradict his lips; they had a look in them which made the sincerity of his compliments very doubtful. And then he said very cutting things about other people. They were not exactly witty; they were certainly not profound but they had a turn in them which made them slip into the mind and stay there inflicting fatal damage by their sarcasm or a laugh that was even more destructive. ‘Why, what could I do, my good fellow, but cut the connection? I discovered that Lady Mary actually ate cabbage!’fn8 ‘Yes, Madam, I once ate a pea,’fn9 he said to a lady who once asked him if he never ate vegetables. And again when pestered about his tour in the north, ‘Which of the lakes do I admire?’ he asked his valet, ‘Windermere, sir.’ ‘Ah, yes – Windermere, so it is – Windermere.’fn10 That was his style, flickering, sneering, hovering on the verge of insolence, skimming the edge of nonsense, but always keeping within some curious mean, so that one knew the false Brummell story from the true by its exaggeration. Brummell would never have said ‘Wales, ring the bell’fn11 any more than he would have worn a brightly coloured waistcoat or a glaring necktie. That ‘certain exquisite propriety’ which Lord Byronfn12 remarked in his dress stamped his whole being and made him appear cool and refined and debonair among the gentlemen who talked only of sport, which Brummell detested, and smelt of the stable, which Brummell never visited. Lady Louisa might well be on tenter-hooks to impress Mr Brummell favourably. Mr Brummell’s good opinion was of the utmost importance in the world of Lady Louisa.
And unless that world fell into ruins his rule seemed assured. Handsome and heartless and cynical, the Beau seemed invulnerable. His taste was impeccable, his health admirable; and his figure as fine as ever. His rule had lasted many years and survived many vicissitudes. The French Revolution had passed over his head without disordering a single hair. Empires had risen and fallen while [h]e experimented with neckcloths and criticised the cut of a coat. Now the battle of Waterloo had been fought and peace had come. It was the peace that undid him. For some time past he had been winning and losing at the gaming tables. Harriette Wilsonfn13 heard that he was ruined and then, rather to her regret, she heard that he was saved again. Now with the armies disbanded there were let loose upon London a horde of rough, ill-mannered men who had been fighting all these years and were determined to enjoy themselves. They flooded the gaming houses. They played very high. Brummell was forced into competition. He lost and he won and he vowed never to play again and then he did play again. At last his remaining ten thousand pounds was gone. He borrowed until he could borrow no more. And finally to crown the loss of so many thousands he lost the six-penny bit with a hole in it which had always brought him good luck. He gave it by mistake to a hackney-coachman, and then he said that rascal Rothschild got hold of it,fn14 and that was the end of his luck. Such was his own account of the matter – other people put a less innocent interpretation on the matter. At any rate, there came a day, the sixteenth of May, 1816,fn15 to be precise, and it was a day to be precise about everything, when he dined alone off a cold fowl and a bottle of claret at Watiers, and attended the opera, and then took coach for Dover. He drove rapidly all through the night and reached Calais the day after. He never set foot in England again.fn16
And now a curious process of disintegration set in. The peculiar and highly artificial society of London had acted as a preservative; it had kept him in being. Now that the pressure was removed the odds and ends, so trifling separately, so brilliant in combination which had made up the being of the Beau fell asunder and revealed what lay beneath. At first his lustre seemed undiminished. His old friends crossed the water to see him and made a point of standing him a dinner and leaving a little present behind them at his bankers. He held his usual levee at his lodgings; he spent the usual hours washing and dressing; he rubbed his teeth with a red root, tweezed out his hairs with a silver tweezer, tied his cravat to admiration and issued out at four precisely as perfectly equipped as if the Rue Royale had been St James’s Street and the Prince himself had hung upon his arm. But the Rue Royale was not St James’s Street; the old French Countess who spat on the floor was not the Duchess of Devonshire; the good bourgeois who pressed him to dine off goose at four was not Lord Alvanley;fn17 and though he soon won for himself the title of Roi de Calais, and was known to workmen as ‘George ring the bell,’fn18 the praise was gross, the society coarse, and the amusements of Calais very slender.
The Beau had to fall back upon the resources of his own mind. These might have been considerable. According to Lady Hester Stanhopefn19 he might have been a very clever man had he chosen; and when she told him so, the Beau admitted that he had wasted his talents because a dandy’s way of life was the only one ‘which could place him in a prominent light and enable him to separate himself from the ordinary herd of men, whom he held in considerable contempt.’fn20 That way of life allowed of verse-making – his verses called ‘The Butterfly’s Funeral’fn21 were much admired – and of singing sentimental airs; and of some dexterity with the pencil. But now when the summer days were so long and empty he found that such accomplishments hardly served to while away the time. He tried to occupy himself with writing memoirs; he bought a screen and spent hours pasting it with pictures of great men and beautiful ladies whose virtues and frailties were symbolised by hyenas, and wasps, and profusions of cupids, fitted together with extraordinary skill; he collected Buhl furniture; he wrote letters in a curiously elegant and elaborate style to ladies. But these occupations palled. The resources of his mind had been whittled away in the course of years; now they soon gave out. And then the crumbling process went a little further, and another organ was laid bare – the heart. He who had played at love all these years and kept so adroitly beyond the range of passion now made violent advances to girls who were young enough to be his daughters. He wrote such violent love letters to Mademoiselle Ellen of Caen that she did not know whether to laugh or to be angry. She was angry, and the Beau who had tyrannised over the daughters of dukes prostrated himself before her in despair. But it was too late – the heart after all these years was not a very engaging object even to a simple country girl, and he seems at last to have lavished his affections upon animals. He mourned his terrier Vick for three weeks, and became the champion of all the neglected cats and starving dogs in Caen. Indeed, he said to a lady that if a man and a dog were drowning in the same pond he would prefer to save the dog if there were nobody looking. But happily he was still persuaded that everybody was looking; and his immense regard for appearances gave him a certain stoical endurance. Thus, when paralysis struck him he left the dinner table with the soup dribbling from his lips without a sign, he still picked his way over the cobbles on the points of his toes to keep his shoes clean, and when the terrible day came and he was thrown into prison for debt he won the admiration of murderers and thieves by appearing among them as cool and courteous as if about to pay a morning call.
But if he were to continue to act his part, it was essential that he should have a sufficiency of boot polish and gallons of eau de cologne and at least three changes of linen every day. His expenditure upon these items was enormous. Generous as his old friends were and persistently as he supplicated them there came a time when they could be squeezed no longer. It was decreed that he was to content himself with one change of linen daily and his allowance was to admit of necessaries only. Soon afterwards he mounted the black silk neckcloth which was the signal of the end. Black silk neckcloths had always been his aversion. After that everything that had made him and that had kept him in being dissolved. His self-respect vanished. He would dine with anyone who would pay the bill. His memory weakened and he told the same story over and over again till the burghers of Caen were bored. Then his manners degenerated. His extreme cleanliness lapsed into carelessness and then into positive filth. He was so dirty that people objected to his presence in the dining room of the hotel. Only one passion remained intact among the crumbled débris – an immense greed. To buy Rheims biscuits he sacrificed the greatest treasure that remained to him – he sold his snuff box. And then nothing was left but a heap of disagreeables, a mass of corruption, a senile and disgusting old man, who was fit only for the charity of nuns and the protection of an asylum. There the clergyman begged him to try to pray. ‘I do try,’ he said, ‘but he added something which made me doubt if he understood me.’fn22 He had no beliefs; he had no terrors[;] he had no desires, save for Rheims biscuits and a seat by a hot fire. Still, one must remember, Byron in his moments of dandyism ‘always pronounced the name of Brummell with a mingled emotion of respect and jealousy.’fn23
Mary Wollstonecraft
VW’s essay in the N&A, 5 October, and the NYHT, 20 October 1929, (Kp4 C316), was later revised for inclusion, under the same title, in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). The reader is referred here, where the revised version, together with variants in the form of endnotes, is printed in its place as part of CR2.
Dorothy Wordsworthfn1
Two very incongruous travellers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, followed close upon each other’s footsteps. Mary was in Altona on the Elbe in 1795 with her baby; three years later Dorothy came there with her brother and Coleridge.fn2 Both kept a record of their travels; both saw the same places, but the eyes with which they saw them were very different. Whatever Mary saw served to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her own soul. The beat of the oars on the waves made her ask: ‘Life, what are you? Where goes this breath – this I so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving and receiving fresh energy?’fn3 The fields and the waves took the shape of her own agitated soul. Dorothy, on the other hand, noted what was before her accurately, literally and prosaically. ‘The walk very pleasing between Hamburg and Altona. A large piece of ground planted with trees and intersected by gravel walks … The ground on the opposite side of the Elbe appears marshy.’fn4 Dorothy never railed against ‘the cloven hoof of despotism.’fn5 Dorothy never asked ‘men’s questions’ about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This ‘I so much alive’ was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass.
So while Mary dashed her head against wall after wall and cried out: ‘Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream’fn6 – Dorothy went on methodically at Alfoxden noting the approach of spring. ‘The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns green, the larches in the park changed from black to green, in two or three days.’fn7 And next day, April 14, 1798, ‘the evening very stormy, so we stayed indoors. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, &c., came.’fn8 And the day after they walked in the squire’s grounds and noticed that ‘nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed – ruins, hermitages, &c.’fn9 There is no reference to Mary Wollstonecraft; it seems as if her life and all its storms had been swept away in one of those compendious etceteras, and yet the next sentence reads like an unconscious commentary. ‘Happily, we cannot shape the huge hills or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.’fn10 No, we cannot reform, we must not rebel; we can only accept and try to understand. And so the notes go on.
Spring passed; summer came; summer turned to autumn; it was winter, and then again the sloes were in blossom and the hawthorns green and spring had come again. But it was spring in the North now, and Dorothy was living alone with her brother in a small cottage at Grasmere in the midst of the hills. Now after the hardships and separations of youth they were together under their own roof; now they could address themselves undisturbed to the absorbing occupation of living in the heart of nature and trying, day by day, to read her meaning. They had money enough at last to let them live together without the need of earning a penny. No family duties or professional tasks distracted them. Dorothy could walk all day on the hills and sit up talking to Coleridge all night without being scolded by her aunt for getting her feet wet or shocking the neighbours. The hours were theirs from sunrise to sunset and could be altered to suit the season.
If it was fine, there was no need to come in; if it was wet, there was no need to get up. One could go to bed at any hour. One could let the dinner cool if the cuckoo were shouting on the hill and William had not found the epithet he wanted. Sunday was not more holy than any other day. Everything was subordinated to the absorbing and exacting and exhausting task of living in the heart of nature and writing poetry. For exhausting it was. William would make his head ache in the effort to find the right word. He would go on hammering at a poem till Dorothy was afraid to suggest an alteration. A chance phrase of hers would run in his head and make it impossible for him to get back into the proper mood. He would come down to breakfast and sit ‘with his shirt neck unbuttoned and his waistcoat open,’ writing a poem on a butterflyfn11 which some story of hers had suggested, and he would eat nothing, and then he would begin altering the poem and would be tired again.
