The house, of seven courts to correspond with the days of the week, fifty-two staircases matching the weeks of the year and 365 rooms answering to the days of the year[1] “is gentle and venerable. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house.” The garden side is the gay, the princely side. When, in summer, the great oak doors of the second gatehouse were left open, “it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.”
[1] “I cannot truthfully say,” writes Miss Sackville-West in Knole and the Sackvilles, “that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he could bring courts, stairs and rooms up to that satisfactory total.”
ii
In 1825 the duchess Arabella Diana died and her estate devolved upon her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as has been told, became the wife of Lord de la Warr. Dying in 1870 she left Buckhurst to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was Miss Sackville-West’s grandfather. He was eighty and she perhaps eight, and as he shared “the family failing of unsociability” it fell to the child’s lot to show the house to visitors. In this, as in more natural ways, she became highly familiar with Knole and from her earliest years must have loved the place. On receipt of a telegram that people were coming, Grandpapa would take the next train for London, “returning in the evening when the coast was clear.” The Cartoon Gallery, the Leicester Gallery, the Brown Gallery; Lady Betty Germaine’s bedchamber; the three principal bedrooms, the Spangled Room, the Venetian Ambassador’s and the King’s chamber, “the only vulgar room in the house” with furniture made entirely in silver and articles of silver, “even to a little eye-bath”—the procession of the days and years was not more certain than the procession of the curious, the inquisitive and the wonder-struck through these. You will fashion your own picture of the daughter of the Sackvilles standing before the portrait of Lady Margaret Sackville (over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting room) and endeavouring, quite vainly, to do her own hair in the elaborate manner of young Lady Margaret’s. Or, it may be, she had been naughty that day, and had hid herself inside the pulpit of the Chapel of the Archbishops, where, in spite of private steps leading out of her bedroom straight into the Family Pew, “they never found me.” Grandpapa was “a queer and silent old man,” as Miss Sackville-West remembers him. “He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave demoiselle cranes.... He and I, who so often shared the house alone between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand a child.... When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him—and never knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me—and sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy, and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London; of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but ‘my Lord’ and ‘my Lady.’ I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to bed....”
iii
At the age of thirteen Miss Sackville-West wrote “an enormous novel” about the figure of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, who seemed to her the embodiment of Cavalier romance. And perhaps he was. “He had the advantage of starting with the Vandyck portrait in the hall, the flame-coloured doublet, the blue Garter, the characteristic swaggering attitude, the sword, the love-locks, the key of office painted dangling from his hip and the actual key dangling on a ribbon from the frame of the picture.” The dashing career of this follower of King Charles, who fought a duel with Lord Bruce and whose younger son was murdered by the Roundheads, became “a source of rich romance to a youthful imagination nourished on Cyrano and The Three Musketeers.” The half-grown girl re-examined certain old nail-studded trunks in the attics, mute witnesses to Cromwellian violence, some of them curved to fit the roof of a barouche. “The battered trunks were stacked near the entrance to the hiding-place, which, without the smallest justification save an old candlestick and a rope-ladder found therein, I peopled with the fugitive figures of priests and Royalists. I peeped into the trunks: they contained only a dusty jumble of broken ironwork, some old books, some bits of hairy plaster fallen from the ceiling, some numbers of Punch for 1850. Nevertheless, there were the gaping holes where the locks had been prised off the trunks, and the lid forced back upon the hinges by an impatient hand. Down in the Poets’ Parlour, where I lunched with my grandfather, taciturn unless he happened to crack one of his little stock-in-trade of jokes, Cromwell’s soldiers had held their Court of Sequestration. The Guard Room was empty of arms or armour, save for a few pikes and halberds, because Cromwell’s soldiers had taken all the armour away. The past mingled with the present in constant reminder; and out in the summer-house, after luncheon, with the bees blundering among the flowers of the Sunk Garden and the dragon-flies flashing over the pond, I returned to the immense ledger in which I was writing my novel, while Grandpapa retired to his little sitting-room and whittled paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes, and thought about—Heaven knows what he thought about.”
iv
Miss Sackville-West is writing of Knole, of course, in her long story called The Heir. The manor of Blackboys with its peacocks is not Knole; I suppose no one makes the mistake of literal identification of people and places in fiction; at least, none should do so. What is truly identifiable is never anything tangible at all; it is merely an emotion. When we read The Heir, subtitled “A Love Story,” and acquaint ourselves in a leisurely sufficience with the fellow Chase we should be stupid indeed if we grasped at the substance and neglected the shadow. It is shadow and its correspondent sunlight for which, after all, mankind lives a life wherein the things of substance are the final unreality....
But her first book, which was brought to the attention of the American publisher by Hugh Walpole, was a novel called Heritage, an unusual story of young lovers. The breath of distinction upon the tale more than redeemed its faults of construction, of which, perhaps, after all, the most serious was merely the device of a letter immensely longer than any epistle probable to be written. Then, in point of publication, at least, came The Dragon in Shallow Waters, also a novel. Some two years elapsed before the appearance of her third novel, Challenge, a piece of work of such a character as to demand our earnest scrutiny. Challenge is being followed by Grey Wethers and The Heir.
I have been speaking of American publication; in England Miss Sackville-West first came to notice as a poet. Her Poems of West and East was followed by another collection called Orchard and Vineyard. Her work in verse exhibited austerity of expression joined to an emotional and descriptive power difficult to appraise. Although it may be, as has been said, that the chief use of poetry, written when one is young, is to produce a finer prose when one is older.