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.