Lady St. Helier And Thomas Hardy

( Originally Published 1912 )

FORTUNATE were those who, visiting London, took with them a letter of introduction to Lady Jeune, who on her husband's elevation to the peerage became Lady St. Helier. The daughter of an ancient but impoverished Highland family, she had been brought up like a Spartan child in austerity and simplicity, with little foretaste or foresight of the ascendency which she was to achieve as much through her personality and natural gifts as through her aristocratic connections. She more than anybody else fused and liberalized London society, leading it out of the ruts of rank and class into a fellowship with art and letters, and surprising both elements by the results of her tact and magnetism. An introduction to her became a passport to many social privileges.

May I attempt a picture of her? — A girl in figure, simply dressed, and fresh as her own heather, with large and beautiful eyes, which might be likened to one of her native lochs in their changing moods, now full, cool, and placid, as in calm and shadow, then as a loch swept by wind and sun, luminous, shimmering and dancing with, in her case, a sort of mischievous and communicative humour. She brought dissimilar elements together, and, as by magic, turned them into affinities. Under her spell the shyest put off their reserve, and the lofty their aloofness. Nor was she merely a mistress of social arts.

It was her privilege to be admitted to conferences of the leaders of public opinion at which no other women were present. Her intellectual and politicial influence was as great as the charm which made her salon so brilliant.

One day she invited me to her house to lunch with the Princess Christian, King Edward's sister, who had become interested in a periodical with which I was connected. The house is closed except to those bidden to it, when royalty is present. The butler is careful to ask you at the door if you are "expected," and he must be sure that you are before he admits you. That is the rule. We were only four, the princess, Lady St. Helier, my wife, and I, and my apprehension of solemnity and constraint, excusable in strangers on presentation to so illustrious a personage (one need not discredit one's self in the least in confessing it), did not last beyond the crossing of the threshold. The princess was not at all distant or difficult in manner or conversation, but gracefully easy, and fluent, an example I should say of the ordinary Englishwoman of education, intelligence, good sense, and good taste. If she differed from that not always genial standard at all, it was in her utter freedom from hauteur or condescension. No one could have been simpler or less reserved, no one more inquiring, attentive, considerate, appealing. She talked chiefly of politics. The country was in the throes of a general election, and she balanced the probabilities and ingeniously reasoned them from a remarkable fulness of information. From time to time we could hear a newsboy passing in the street and piping his "extras," and in the middle of a discussion she excused herself and told the butler to get a copy for her. She buried herself in the sheet for a moment, and shaking her head, turned to me - I infer that a Radical victory was recorded — asking with naοve apprehension in her eye, "Do you think the throne is in any danger?"

What could one reply to that? Even a deep-dyed Radical himself must have reassured her and declared that any throne of which she was one of the ornaments could not possibly be in any peril.

There, too, one met among scores of other brilliant women, Mrs. Cragie "John Oliver Hobbs"— the American girl, an exquisite creature who for many sea-sons provided London with much of its wit. Her books may perish, but not her epigrams. Many of them are current, and already the people who quote them can-not remember their source and assign them to Sheridan, Disraeli, or Oscar Wilde. What could have been happier than the duchess, who divided the world into three classes, "Dears, poor dears, and persons?" or this: "There is no such thing as everybody — that is a news-paper vulgarism. One is either a somebody or a no-body — irrespective of rank or profession. The next best thing to a somebody is a nobody in a good set." There were so many of them that choice is embarrassed. She herself had no poor opinion of them. Whenever she was reminded of them she could laugh at them as though she had never heard them before.

One night she took me to see her comedy, "The Ambassadors " at St. James Theatre. She had surely seen it many times before, for the end of the run was at hand, and stale as it may have become to others it had not lost its freshness for her. It was like being with a delighted child at a play. Each sally, each slant of wit, pleased her as much as it did the audience, and her eyes sparkled into mine for the confirmation of merit, which would have been spontaneous even without her fascinating presence.

She was fascinating in many ways, girlish in spirit and in appearance; very slender, very dainty, very smart, and gowned like a princess. People fell in love with her and' artists beseeched her to sit for them. There are several pictures of her in pastel, oil, and crayon, but to me she seemed to be one of those who in portraiture call for and justify the delicacy of the miniature. She had more than beauty and vivacity, however, and while we yielded to those we became aware of a character as ambitious and dauntless as a man's. Not a bit of a blue-stocking, externally a woman of the world of fashion, she was, with all her gayety and facility, a scholar, and as happy and competent in conversation with solemn intellectuals and seniors as with simpler people.

I remember a lovely Sunday in the Isle of Wight, where her father had a house to which she ran down from time to time during the season, especially for those charming English week-ends. In that house, as in her town house in Lancaster Gate, she was always surrounded by clever people. To keep an appointment in town she started back to London on the Sunday evening, radiant, and, so far as eye could see, in perfect health. The next morning, as I sat in the sunny garden on a ledge between the violet sea and the rim of the cliffs, a crying woman creeping toward me shocked me with the news that when called an hour or so earlier Pearl Cragie had been found dead in bed at Lancaster Gate, with peace in her face, and a crucifix clasped to her bosom.

It was also through Lady Jeune that I became acquainted with Sir Henry Thompson, the physician of kings, and, in the way of avocation, a painter of very good pictures, which hung in the Royal Academy. He was a small, courtly, handsome man, with face so infantile in its purity of complexion, that the frame of gray hair made it almost abnormal. A rigorous dietician, he habitually carried gluten and other ingredients of health food with him wherever he went. His books, which have a wide circulation, explain his theories, but the theories were only for those who wanted them. The dinners he gave — they contributed hardly less to his celebrity than his pictures and professional skill — were epicurean. He called them "octaves" from the fixed number of the people who sat down to them, never more or less than eight, and they included nearly everybody of distinction in literature, science, art, and politics during nearly forty years. They began with Dickens, Browning, and Thackeray among the guests; King Edward as Prince of Wales came to four, and they were all given in the same room with the same table and chairs during the entire series. At that to which I was bidden, Joseph Chamberlain and Thomas Hardy were present and placed next to each other, and I wondered what topic two men so dissimilar could find for conversation.

The most astute of politicians, with little concern for literature and a merely casual knowledge of it, on one hand, and on the other hand the shyest of authors to whom politics were remote and uninspiring: They seemed to get along very well, and when an opportunity came I asked Hardy what they had talked about. Had Chamberlain confided the secrets of the cabinet to him, or had Hardy, breaking his habit of reserve, disclosed to the rather saturnine wearer of the orchid and the monocle, the evolution of another Tess or Jude?

Hardy smiled: "We did talk, didn't we? It was all about — what do you suppose? Genealogy. The genealogy of the Endicotts of Dorset, who are the ancestors of Mrs. Chamberlain, who was an Endicott of Salem, Massachusetts."

I had a suspicion that he, as well as I, had expected to be engaged by a greater interest than that, but Mr. Chamberlain was usually pragmatic, and never revealed if he had it, the charm of social adaptivity and plasticity.

When Hardy came to town from Wessex he often made Lady Jeune's his home, and the fewer the company the more at ease he became. Low-voiced, abstracted and ever self-effacing, he might have been taken for a mild, timid, and unsophisticated cleric; he was the last person one would have hit on in a crowd as the author of those novels which take possession of us and make us as intimate with their scenes and characters as his Marty South was with the boughs which, brushing her face in the dark lane, were recognized by her at once, each variety of invisible shrub and tree recording itself with a human touch through her intuition and long experience.

We went to see him at Dorchester one day, and varied the journey by coaching from Wool across the heath which he calls Egdon and which on the map is Bere. Down there time has little changed the face of the land, or the character of the people. As they were a century and more ago they are essentially now. Wool is the end of the branch line, and across the fields from the station is the gray old manor-house, where Tess and Angel Clare ate supper on their wedding night. The empty stone coffin in which Tess reposed remains in the precincts of the ruined abbey. The neighbourhood reverberates traditions of the historical D'Urbervilles, from whom she descended, and the little church of Bere Regis (Kings Bere in the novel), with its grotesquely carved and painted roof, has many memorials of their ancient splendour. Hither came Bathsheba, of "Far from the Mad-ding Crowd," to the fair, and within a league is Weather-bury Castle, the scene of Swithin St. Cleeve's distraction between love and the pursuit of astronomy. The awe of the heavens was never communicated with greater awe than in that novel — "Two on a Tower" — which unexpurgated, made its first appearance in the Atlantic Monthly. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then the editor of that periodical, and I remember how he halted over the daring of the story. "I asked Hardy for a family story, and he has given me a story in the family way," he complained to me with a sigh that could have lifted a sea.

Then we came to other scenes of "Far From the Madding Crowd, and saw Gabriel Oak shepherding his lambs, and the covert where Sergeant Troy met Fanny Robin. Egdon is wild and sombre under its coat of wind-swept, ruffled gorse and heather, "an untamable Israelish king," as Hardy calls it, but it is less spacious and less austere to those who come freshly to it than it is in his description. I know of savager and bleaker moorland within thirty miles of Charing Cross.

Dorchester is the Casterbridge of the novels, a sleepy, unchanging place, where Roman wrecks overlay the still existing ruins of the aboriginals. A great amphitheatre is one sign of its antiquity, and not far from the long high street, upon which so many of his creations have passed, we found the modest villa of brick and terra-cotta which he designed and built for himself after leaving Wimborne. Sentimentally, we might prefer and expect to see him in a moated grange, but his own choice was utilitarian, and he points with more pride to the true workmanship of carpenters, masons, and plumbers than to ornament. Relics of the Romans turn up as often as his garden is spaded, and where Caesar's legions dwelt he abides in the spirit of Gray's "Elegy, " and breathes the soothing air untempted by the turmoil of the town.

He warms up in congenial society, but his humour is like a thread of silver in a sombre tapestry. The impression he makes is that he is one of those who, in John Burroughs's haunting phrase, are "Unhoused from their comfortable anthropomorphic creeds and beginning to feel the cosmic chill." I took away with me from conversation at a dinner he gave me at the Savile Club the idea of a doomed universe with its population succumbing to the apathy of progressive and sterilizing melancholia.

Richard Whiteing of "No. 5 John Street" and Sir William Robertson Nicholl, theologian, essayist, and editor, were with us that day. Whiteing is a big, dark, tender, earnest man, whose success in fiction came to him, as to De Morgan, in middle life and after exhausting years of hard work in journalism. Nicholl is a wee Scotchman with a dreamy manner and a voice that seldom rises above a whisper. The manner cloaks a prodigy of versatility and industry. He is a preacher, a lecturer, a leader of the non-conformists, a voluminous author and the editor of I don't know how many dissimilar periodicals, including the learned Expositor and the popular British Weekly. That night he was going home, late as our return was, to begin and finish before retiring, a new introduction to the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He brims with the quick, insinuating humour of his race. A newly created knight was also with us, and Nicholl, the unknighted himself, mischievously chaffed him on his promotion.