LADY HOLLAND'S JOURNAL.*
WE know so much about Holland House and the men and women who frequented it that we are glad to have anything on the subject of its mistress. Lord Ilehester has done well to reprint her Journal, which casts much light on her earlier • The-Journal of Elisabeth, Lady Holland (1791-1811). Edited by the Earl of Ilehester. 2 vols. Landon Lonstasas aid Co- Rd& net.] years. It stops at 1811, and the chief interest of Holland House comes later; but by that year the character of the writer was fully, formed, and she had passed through the main crises of her life. Hers was not altogether- an attractive character. In her fatuous years she was rude and domineering. She ordered distinguished men about as if they were lackeys, and her amazing success as a hostess was won at the expense of her popularity as a woman. "Everybody who goes there," said Charles Greville, "finds something to abuse or ridicule in the mistress of the house." llgo Foscolo professed his readiness to go to hell with Lord Holland, but his utter refusal to go to heaven with her Ladyship. The first Lord Dudley is even more severe. He disliked Lady Holland, he tells us, " for the extreme badness of her heart." She " hates a Court where she is not presentable, and a town where she is only partially visited." The Journal explains the reason of this ostracism, and accounts also for many of her extravagances. The poor lady had suffered sadly in her youth. The only child and heiress of a rich West Indian planter, she was married at fifteen to a Sussex Baronet, Sir Godfrey Webster, of Battle Abbey. Sir Godfrey was twenty-three years older than his bride, and the marriage was not a success. He took her to live in a small house on his estate, while hie aunt lived at the Abbey, and young Lady Webster seems to have behaved as badly as possible to the old lady. Her husband was in Parliament and liked a country life, but she forced him to take her abroad, and dragged his unwilling feet about the Continent. The husband may have been unkind to the wife, but we are bound to say that he had unusual provocation. Lady Webster assumed that the fault was wholly on his side, and longed for some one " to be dependent upon for happiness." In 1794 she found that some one in the young Lord Holland, then only twenty-one years of age, who was in the middle of the Grand Tour. She was divorced in 1796, and married her lover immediately after. In order to keep one of her children out of her husband's hands she pretended that it had died, and had a mock funeral carried out,—a heartless trick which goes far to justify Lord Dudley's phrase. Afterwards she confessed to Sir Godfrey and returned the child. The result of these adventures was that outside the ladies of Lord Holland's family, the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Bessborough, and a few others, no respectable woman would speak to her. To conduct a salon it would seem as if a " past " were necessary for the hostess. Men must be able to come without their womenfolk, or the thing degenerates into a dull party. Lady Holland had no great beauty, and her talk was that of a drum-major, but she had a charming house, a delightful husband, and this useful ineligibility for ordinary society. The story of her early life makes one sympathise with Sir Godfrey, and a good deal also with the lady herself. Active, undisciplined, and intensely egotistical, she was born to give pain and to suffer it. She was deeply attached to Lord Holland, and made him an exemplary, if tyrannical, wife.
Lord Ilcbester, besides contributing an interesting intro- diction, has annotated these volumes with remarkable care. Scarcely an allusion but is deftly tracked, and he has provided a wealth of family history to elucidate the entries. The book cannot compare with the beat journals. Lady Holland had no literary skill, little or no humour, and an indifferent sense of proportion. At the same time, no candid record of any human life is without value, and a woman who lived so close to great movements and great men must have her momenta of interest. The diary begins in 1791, when she is touring about the Riviera and Italy alone, Sir Godfrey having gone home in disgust. She was only twenty, and shows herself a curious mixture of the would-be Bluestocking and the lady of fashion. She was a most industrious sightseeer, and reveals a con- siderable knowledge of classical history in her comments. We are always finding notes like this : " Near Misenum Tiberius breathed out his gloomy soul." She is a keen, and on the whole judicious, critic of pictures, though to-day it is difficult to follow her in her enthusiasm for Guido Reni. Politics attract her little, though she tells the story of the formation of the Association of the Friends of the People, and insists that Fox was never consulted about it. At Florence she met Armfeldt, the friend of Gustavus III., with the white handker- chief round his arm which gained him so much female interest. She was shrewd enough to detect a pose. "He begs compassion so much that one is tempted to withhold it."- Later at Brussels she met a still more romantic figure, Fersen, the friend of Marie Antoinette, whom all readers of The King with Two Faces will remember. Sometimes she moralises. She admits that she feels the need of being dependent on another, but since this is a dangerous thought to one in her position it must be checked, and " selfish independence alone encouraged." Sometimes she embarks on a flight of fancy, as when she stands on the watershed of the Danube and the Rhine. She is best when she is neither moral nor fanciful, but shrewd, as in such a comment as this on France :—" Every man enjoys the prospect of placing his humble cot on a level with the proud palace, forgetting that the equality can only be maintained by lowering the palace to the cot."
She first met her second husband at Florence, and records that he has many personal defects ; " but his pleasingness of manner and liveliness of conversation got over them speedily." Soon she is enraptured with him : " his gaiety is beyond anything I ever knew." She discusses him in her Journal, his birth, his politics, and his abilities. He had the mind and disposition of Fox, she thought, and the manners of Fitzpatrick. After that, save for an acid account of the ridiculous Hamiltons at Naples, the Journal grows meagre, and does not expand till at the age of twenty-six, having secured her divorce, she married her lover of twenty-three. Politics were now the major interest in her life,—curious politics, for they were singularly detached and eclectic. She saw the faults of all parties, and was enamoured of the merits of none. " I have had ao strange an education," she writes in a burst of self- criticism, "that if I speak freely upon sacred subjects it is not from an affectation of being an esprit fort, but positively because I have no prejudices to combat with." This seems true ; she began with no prejudices, though she soon created many. She is full of petty personal grudges, taking the cue from her male friends. She sneers at Camperdown because Duncan was a Scotsman and a friend of Dundas, and she is always girding at Canning. She thought him " upon grave subjects a tres petit monsieur," and "the veriest Jacobin there is." She censures him for despising "titles and the aristocracy of hereditary nobility," though elsewhere she laughs at Lord Lansdowne for the high value he set on them. The truth is that her Ladyship was a good deal of a Jacobin, and was never quite happy in the orthodox Whig family circle. She saw the faults of the Revolution, but she was far more afraid of a reaction. "Fifty years hence I have no hesitation in foretelling that there will be little toleration, a curbed press, a great standing army, and what is called a vigilant Government." That was in 1799, and fifty years after we had the first Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the Repeal of the Corn-laws.
The second volume is less interesting than the first, for it is full of backstairs political gossip which has by this time lost its point. There is an impressive account of Fox's death, and we can trace the beginning of that cult of St. Charles which was so long the religion of good Whigs. The Hollands travelled mach abroad, and made long tours in Scotland and the North of England. The foibles of the great houses they visited are often very happily hit off. At Windermere she summoned Wordsworth to dine. " He is much superior to his writings, and his conversation is even beyond his abilities." Coleridge she detested. "His nature is radically bad ; he hates and envies all that is good and celebrated, and to gratify that spleen he has given in to Methodism, not from conviction, but solely to enable him to give vent to - his malignity in a garb which is a passe partout." Her Ladyship is not a great story-teller, but there is an amusing anecdote of the politeness of the Due de Luxembourg, who was invited by Lord Moira to try some wonderful liqueur. He drank it with a wry face, but bowed assent to all that was said in its praise. Afterwards Lord Moira found that he had given his guest castor-oil. Many of her stories are against the Scotch. "At a dinner of the Chief Baron's, where Sylvester Douglas was, the news, just then fresh, of Bonaparte's seizure of the Government was mentioned, upon which both the Scotchmen at the same moment inquired, And what did Macdonald do?" The best story is of that hoary reprobate, Old Q., who the day before he died in 1811 wanted to alter his will. "He said he had been a fool in leaving legacies, for in fact all belonged to Bonaparte, and any distribution was idle."
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