It was this self-will, this colossal egotism that led her to spend so much of her time in conversation—if those could be called conversations in which one of the talkers insisted upon a monopoly of attention. It would be more accurate to describe them as monologues, with occasional interpolations of assent on the part of the listener. We have no wish to underrate their charm, though, from the reports transmitted to posterity, they would hardly seem to have deserved the very warm eulogy pronounced by the physician, who says,[25] "Her conversations lasted eight and ten hours at a time, without moving from her seat: so that, although highly entertained, instructed, or astonished at her versatile powers, as the listeners might be, it was impossible not to feel the weariness of so long a sitting. Everybody," he adds, "who visited Lady Hester Stanhope in her retirement will bear witness to her unexampled colloquial powers; to her profound knowledge of character; to her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes; to her talents for mimicry; to her modes of narration, as various as the subjects she talked about; to the lofty inspiration and sublimity of her language, when the subject required it; and to her pathos and feeling, whenever she wished to excite the emotions of her hearers. There was no secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth, however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person that his character and course of life were unmasked to her view, she would, in his very presence, paint him such a picture of himself, in drawing the portrait of another, that you might see the individual writhing on his chair, unable to conceal the effect the words had on his conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and hypocrisy."
We have admitted Lady Hester Stanhope's great mental powers, but we can find no trace in the records of her conversation of such extraordinary genius as is here indicated. No doubt, she talked very well; but like all great talkers, she sometimes talked very ill. The great attraction of her conversation was its reflection of one strange personality: she glassed herself in it as in a mirror; and as she had seen much, and known many great men, and gone through a vast variety of experience, she had always something to tell which was interesting. But how largely it was informed by egotism, and how narrowly at times it escaped the reproach of silliness, may be understood, I think, from the following specimen:—
"Doctor," one day she said to her physician, "you have no religion: what I mean by religion is, adoration of the Almighty. Religion, as people profess it, is nothing but a dress. One man puts on one coat, and another another. But the feeling that I have is quite a different thing, and I thank God that He has opened my eyes. You will never learn of me, because you cannot comprehend my ideas, and therefore it is of no use teaching you. Nobody opens a book to an idiot, that would foam and splutter over it; for you never could make him read. Ah! I see my way a little before me, and God vouchsafes to enlighten me perhaps more than other people....
"It was ever an object with me to search out why I came into the world, what I ought to do in it, and where I shall go to. God has given me the extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity; for a clear judgment becomes matter of fact. It has ever been my study to know myself. I may thank God for my sufferings, as they have enabled me to dive deeper into the subject than, I believe, any person living. The theory of the soul, doctor, what an awful thing!
"My religion is to try to do as well as I can in God's eyes. That is the only merit I have. I try to do the best I can. Some of the servants sometimes talk about my religion—dyn es Sytt, as they call it—and I let them talk; for they explain it to people by saying it is to do what is right, and to avoid all uncleanliness.
"My views of the Creator are very different. I believe that all things are calculated, and what is written is written; but I do not suppose that the devil is independent of God: he receives his orders. Not that God goes and gives them to him, any more than the big my lord goes and gives orders to his shoe-black. There is some secondary being that does that—some intendant.
"There are angels of different degrees, from the highest down to the devil. It must be an awful sight to see an angel! There is something so transcendent and beautiful in them, that a person must be half out of his senses to brave the sight. For, when you are looking down, and happen to raise your head, and there is the angel standing before you, you can't say whether it came up through the earth, or down from the sky, or how—there he is, and may go in the same way. But angels don't appear to everybody. You know, doctor, you can't suppose that if you were a dirty little apothecary, keeping a shop in a narrow street, a prime minister would waste his time in going to call on you; or that, if a man is sitting over his glass all the evening, or playing whist, or lounging all the morning, an angel will come to him. But where there is a mortal of high rectitude and integrity, then such a being may be supposed to condescend to seek him out.
"God is my Friend—that is enough; and, if I am to see no happiness in this world, my share of it, I trust, will be greater in the next, if I am firm in the execution of those principles which He has inspired me with."[26]
In reference to her inveterate love of smoking, her physician says, "Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco.... All I can say is, that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long Oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts. In her bed, lying with her pipe in her mouth, she would talk on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Richmond stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.
"Her bedroom, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.