THE HOLLAND-HOUSE SET.
WE may perhaps review "Holland House" next week, for there is a plum or two in it yet not extracted by the Quarterly and the reviewers who write from proofs, but our present purpose is not to weigh the Princess of Lichtenstein's book, but to ask how it comes to be published at all, with such a parade, and yet with such an acclaim. Why has Holland House held such an immense, yet, as it seems to us, such an unreal place among us? Its four suc- cessive Lords have been genuine Whigs, it is true, but excepting the profligate gambler who tried to beat Pitt and failed, and who with all his successes had neither the brains of Burke nor the wit of Sheridan, not one of the line did anything sufficiently great to be re- membered of the people. One of them charmed Macaulay into a wild panegyric as unlike Macaulay in spirit as it is like his earlier style, bat except that he could not understand, and therefore always wor- shipped Napoleon I., he did little that any other Peer occasionally in office might not have done. The family, throughout their history, helped to give Liberalism an aristocratic tinge, which at times was valuable ; but it is not for that they have been remembered, have been so strongly praised, or are even now so deeply regretted. The Cavendishes and Russells have done ten times as much, and are never exalted, except by grave historians. It is by its special place in literature that the fame of the House lives, and it owes even that place mainly to two acci- dents. It is almost the only country-house of the first class standing in London itself, and its historic habit has been to use that privilege—a privilege so great, that if it could be guarded against Railways, the House would be worth half-a- million at auction—to become a centre for town celebrities. During one long reign, that of the third Lord, it was visited by everybody who was a celedrity in Europe, especially by some of the very best of English litterateurs who happened to be in London, and whose survivors recall still a scene which they remember with mingled pleasure and admiration. The third Lady Holland, an able, imperious, and witty woman, with plenty of means ands good cook, had set her heart upon being the centre of a certain kind of society, on keeping, as the Princess cleverly says, a " proof-house " for eminencies ; and as far as the diplomatists and the talkers and the wits went, she certainly succeeded. Why she succeeded, we, in the changed atmosphere of the world, cannot, we confess, even imagine. Every account represents her as a domineering, despotic woman, with a delight in bitter sayings,, with courage sufficient to attack the strong, but with at heart no quality so strong as her love of power ; who ordered Sydney Smith to ring the bell, not as any lady might have done, but as the bad-mannered address footmen ; and told her husband before everybody that she would not sit down with him unless he changed his white waistcoat for a coloured one. Why did Tom Moore go there to be told that his forthcoming book would be a dull one, or Sydney Smith to be deliberately insulted about his daughter's marriage to "an apothecary "—Sir Henry Holland—or Count d'Orsay to be made to pick up things till he ordered his dinner to be placed on the floor like a lap-dog's, as the most -convenient arrangement for Lady Holland. Flunkeyism will not explain the phenomenon for an instant, for scores were there who were never flunkeys, and Lady Holland constantly caught sharp and indignant rebukes, the strongest perhaps being, if we remember, Lord Dudley's, who walked out of the room and went home, because his hostess -moved him too much from place to place. We presume the charm was in the existence of an intellectual atmosphere, such as at that time could be created in few places, though it bad existed in a previous age in the sanded parlour of an inn where Dr. Johnson tyrannised and taught; in that expectation of meeting cele- brities which has for some minds a fascination, and for others an acute dread of disenchantment ; but above all, in the sense that Holland House was an admirable school for con- versation. It was not the best, for the company was too large, the abandon was imperfect, and the sense of conflict too keen— one man, for instance, Macaulay, came out of it a bore, a man who never stopped, but talked most charmingly in three volumes of closely printed octavo—but it was the best procurable, and there was something in the time favourable to seances of talk. Life was slow, in fact, and a tableful of bons mote a grand enjoy-
ment, which, recollected by weary, but eminent men, has made Holland House live on in recollection.
If it had lived on in fact, exercising its old influence, it would, we believe, have become an unmitigated evil. As for politics, nothing is so fatal to progress as the sway of dining-room ideas, of small plots and sharp epigrams, of the kind of conspiracy of the drawing-room which the Legitimists of France are the very men to carry out, and have just failed ridiculously to perfect, of the kind of intrigue known in our recent history as the "Cave." Holland House would have been a perpetual "Cave," ruled by men and women of great ability in talk, with great fertility in suggestive- ness, with much capaeity for criticism, and some for minor intrigue, but utterly destitute of sympathy with the electors, and therefore within the Houses only a faction, and outside them only a derision. Such cliques in Continental States have often made Governments, as the (Eli de Bred, which, except that it was rather stupider, was very like Holland House used to do ; but they have much more often destroyed them. A dozen Charles Foxes could do no good in the House of Commons now ; and our Mirabeau, when he does appear, will probably be practically a teetotaler, who never gamed or flirted in his life, but can by his terrible sincerity induce the masses to follow him to utter change. When, if ever, the multitudes rise here, it will not be at the call either of Charles James Fox or of the third Lord Holland, but, as Mr. Disraeli has predicted, of some man with philosophy in his brain and democratic fury in his heart. As to Litera- ture, the decisions of an English Forty, even if they met at a splendid dinner-table and were bullied by a modern Queen of Sheba,would meet with little respect in Society, and none at all in the nation. Who endorsed "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or who sanctioned "Mill on Liberty " ? The world has grown too big for all that, and the real representatives of literature would growl their contempt for the dictation of a set, however eminent its members, or however free from the ordinary vice of cliques,—that of puffing one another. From this the Holland-House set was free ; but it was not free of care whether Lady Holland approved something she could not judge of, or whether, as sometimes hap- pened, the whole set might not be urged on an author to punish some tone of independence. They had Holland House in their minds as they wrote, instead of their own minds, or the minds of the world ; and an influence of that kind is invariably weakening, even though it should enforce that moderation of expression which seems sometimes so strong. Every restraint beyond the restraints imposed by the consensus of the age they live in is a source of weakness, whether to poet, philosopher, or historian ; and the strongest of restraints is the opinion of a clique other- wise acceptable to the author. He, either conscious of the restraint, loses his strength in fury,—a very common pheno- menon just now ; or accepting the restraint, he emascu- lates his ideas. Writing about anything, except perhaps history, under such fetters, is like writing about the Tich- borne Case under the view of contempt of Court entertained by the Queen's Bench. You must either repeat smooth nothings, or having to dare the Court, say twice as much as you would if left entirely free. Holland House was a Court for Litera- ture, and literature, if it needs any tribunal at all except the voice of mankind, needs one that does not judge in full dress, at the dinner-table, or under the eye of a President with fixed ideas, artificial manners, and an overmastering desire to snub. We are not sorry that Holland House, in its ancient form, has departed into history amidst a shower of crackers, eacb of them with a little sting in its fiery tail. It did its work as a magazine of bons mots, and when they have all been told, we trust it will have peace.
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