That a person so fond of society should have shown so little tact in it is one of the curious features of her case. But some things throw an interesting light on her brusqueness, her downright rudeness. Here is one brief passage about a woman she met and liked. “If I were to see much of her she might perhaps be benefited, for as nobody can do more mischief to a woman than a woman, so perhaps might one reverse the maxim and say nobody can do more good. A little mild reproof and disapprobation of some of her doctrines might possibly rescue her from the gulf.” Does not that explain a host of oddities, and pleasantly? Who of us likes to be rescued from the gulf by a little mild reproof?

And the woman was nervous, sensitive, imaginative. Society irritates such people even when it fascinates them. Of one guest she writes: “His loud voice and disgusting vanity displeased me so much that I fled for refuge speedily into my own room.” Another bit of most delicate analysis shows how easily the social disillusionment of a sensitive organization might manifest itself in tactless ill-humor. “There is some perverse quality in the mind that seems to take an active pleasure in destroying the amusement it promises to itself. It never fails to baffle my expectations; so sure as I propose to my imagination an agreeable conversation with a person where past experience warrants the hope, so sure am I disappointed. I feel it perpetually, for example, with Dumont; with him I have passed very many cheerful hours. This knowledge tempts me to renew our walks, the consequence is we both yawn.” So clear, so sure is it, that in all human relations the true road to happiness and enjoyment is not to seek them directly for one’s self.

The sense of power, of guiding and controlling others, was doubtless a large element of Lady Holland’s social instinct. “Her love and habit of domination were both unbounded,” writes Greville. To achieve this, to govern the sort of men that gathered about her, she knew that she must study their pursuits. Hence she devoted herself to the details of politics almost as sedulously as did Greville himself. The minuteness of her Spanish Journals, personally of little importance, in this respect, is remarkable. Yet I know of few things more delightfully feminine than her brief comment on ministerial changes. Her friends go out of power, and she observes, “The loss of all interest in public affairs was the natural effect of the change of Administration to me.”

It is, I hope, by this time evident, that, whatever her virtues or her defects, Lady Holland was an extraordinarily interesting character. I have quoted from her guests and friends much that was bitter. But a careful search brings out also testimony all the more favorable when we consider the extent of the abuse. Thus Greville admits that “though often capricious and impertinent, she was never out of temper, and bore with good-humor and calmness the indignant and resentful outbreaks which she sometimes provoked in others.” And while asserting that “She was always intensely selfish,” he adds in the next sentence that “To those who were ill and suffering, to whom she could show any personal kindness and attention, among her intimate friends, she never failed to do so.” Sydney Smith writes to her with a tenderness, an obviously genuine affection, which would prove fine qualities in any woman: “I am not always confident of your friendship for me at particular times; but I have great confidence in it from one end of the year to the other: above all, I am confident that I have a great affection for you.” “I have heard five hundred people assert that there is no such agreeable house in Europe as Holland House: why should you be the last person to be convinced of this and the first to make it true?” “I love the Hollands so much that I would go to them in any spot, however innocent, sequestered and rural.” Finally, the most sympathetic, as well as one of the shrewdest judgments, comes from Sir Henry Holland, the physician, who had studied Lady Holland in all her aspects perhaps as carefully as any one. “In my long and intimate knowledge of Lady Holland, I never knew her to desert an old friend, whatever his condition might be. Many things seemingly wilful and incongruous in her might be explained through this happier quality of mind blended with that love of power, which, fostered by various circumstances, pervaded every part of her life.... Her manner of conversation at the dinner-table—sometimes arbitrary and in rude arrest of others, sometimes courteously inviting the subject—furnished a study in itself. Every guest felt her presence, and generally more or less succumbed to it. She was acute in distinguishing between real and false merit, and merciless in her treatment of the latter. Not a woman of wit in words, she had what might well be called consummate wit in all her relations to society. Once only, and that very late in life, she spoke to me of the labor she underwent in maintaining the position thus acquired.”

May we not accept Greville’s dictum that she was a very strange woman, adding that, after all, she played her rôle of a great lady in not unseemly fashion? And perhaps it was with some justice that on her deathbed she spoke—most characteristically—of her life “with considerable satisfaction, asserting that she had done as much good and as little harm as she could during her existence.”

III
Miss Austen

CHRONOLOGY