ROMANTIC LIVES
OUR language badly needs an epithet for those characters whose orbit, like a comet's, differs from those of their fellow creatures. " Eccentric," which etymologically should be perfect, has come to suggest marked or even repellent oddity, such as eating peas with a shoe-horn or never changing one's vest. What we want is an English equivalent for un original. In the case of Miss Sackville-West's mother, we can be partly consoled for the lack, since French came more easily to her than English. She was odd in many ways : Regarde, she exclaimed, writing to her daughter on paper filched from the Ladies' Cloakroom at Harrod's, comme ce papier prend beaucoup mieux rencre que le Bromo : but " eccentric " is quite inadequate, besides being too graceless, to describe her.
Miss Sackville-West's book falls into two parts. Pepita was her grandmother, a lovely and brilliant Spanish dancer whose fortune it was to love and be loved by Lionel Sackville- West. The diplomat could not marry her, anxious though he was to do so : she was married already, to a Spaniard named Oliva. But the affair lasted, with escuisions on Pepita's part, and she bore him seven children before her death iii 1871. One of these children, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina, was Miss Sackville-West's mother.
She is the subject of the second part of the book, and, fascinating though Pepita's story is, and filled with all manner of fantastic detail, it is this second part which, for me at any rate, makes the book. In it Miss Sackville-West's cool, half-humorous detachment gives way to something no less humorous, no less controlled, but warmer, richer, and quite beautiful. I have always been an admirer of Miss Sackville-
West's writing, but in these last chapters she has surpassed herself. Even All Passion Spent can hardly match them.
Affection has lit and shot her prose with new colours. The balance is as perfect as the taste. Her record of this wayward, delightful, maddening creature is extraordinarily moving, and continuously funny.
Victoria emerged into the limelight when her father was sent to Washington. He sadly needed someone to play hostess, and so attractive and accomplished was his daughter that her dubious origin was overlooked, and she set off with royal and official approval. The immediate volley of proposals for her hand were the start of a life madly filled with incident, every sensation of which she savoured to the full. Marrying her cousin, she became mistress of Knole, and was launched on her triumphant career. Its heyday, from the reader's point of view, comes when her daughter was old enough to appreciate her properly.
" My mother was adorable at that time of her life. She was tire- some, of course, and wayward, and capricious, and thoroughly spoilt ; but her charm and real inward gaiety enabled her to carry it all off. One forgave her everything when one heard her laugh and saw how frankly she was enjoying herself. As a child can be maddening at one moment and irresistible the next, so could my mother be maddening and irresistible by turns. For, like a child, she neither analysed nor controlled her moods : they simply blew across her, and she was first one thing, then the other, without exactly realising which side was uppermost. She never thought much ; she merely lived. Whatever she was, she was with all her heart ; there were no half-measures. Energy such as hers needed something to occupy it all the time, and it followed naturally that she conceived one disastrous idea after the other."
A shop in South Audley Street was one of the most incon- venient of those ideas, especially for her daughter, who was pressed into all manner of service for it. The range of Lady Sackville's vagaries swung between casually buying her daughter a two thousand pound necklet and cutting out the un- postmarked bits of used stamps to paste together and make new ones.
" She herself was quite unaware of contradiction or incongruities. She just went gaily on her way, taking everything as it came, suffering when circumstances forced her to suffer, enjoying herself when she could, which was often. I never knew anybody who got more desperately or unnecessarily into despair or, next moment, enjoyed herself more heartily than she. It was rather confusing to anyone who took moods too seriously : one moment she would be in tears saying that my father wanted to kill her with worry because the electric lighting at Knole had broken down, and next moment she would be mopping her eyes with laughter because a gardener had stumbled over a flower-pot."
Lawsuits complicated her path through life, and she got full value from them. The War was an outrage : she wrote to Kitchener, who could not be brought to realise the impossi- bility of doing without manservants at Knole. She could not subdue him, but she defeated a sterner enemy, the seasons of the year, by planting a flowerbed full of tin flowers which would always be in bloom.
On the last page, Miss Sackville-West sums up.
" Many people have told me what a clever woman my mother was, and what good taste she had ; it was a sort of label tied onto her ; but it was utterly wrong. She was anything but clever, and her taste was anything but good. What-they never realised was that she was, above all things, herself. Wrong or right, tiresome, troublesome, turbulent, difficult, generous, mean, vindictive, revengeful, unjust; kind, lavish, enthusiastic, all in turn, she was always herself, and to be always oneself to that extent is a form of genius. To thine own self be true '—never hive I known anybody who to their own self was truer, in every detail, creditable or uncreditable."
The book has a charm and grace and wisdom as impossible to classify as is its subject.
_ J. . A. G. STRONG.
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