Moments of Being

  This frustrated desire to be a man of genius, and the knowledge that he was in truth not in the first flight – a knowledge which led to a great deal of despondency, and to that self-centredness which in later life at least made him so childishly greedy for compliments, made him brood so disproportionately over his failure and the extent of it and the reasons for it – these are qualities that break up the fine steel engraving of the typical Cambridge intellectual. He had considerably more idiosyncracy, more character as a man – for I am trying to see him as a man not as a father – than the stock Cambridge type. For men like Lowell and Fred Maitland and Herbert Fisher not only admired him; but felt a protecting humorous love for him; so I judge from his power to breed stories; to create a legend. Fred Maitland for instance told how they marched over the Cornish moors all day and Leslie was silent; “but I felt we had become friends”; and Lytton told me of some Strachey cousin who had watched my father as he sat by the fire swinging his foot, and every time his foot swung it knocked against a fire dog; and every time my father said “Damn”; but not another word. And the Strachey cousin was attracted. Mrs Cornish too, speaking of his great attractiveness to Fred Benson, said: “He did by instinct all the little things that women like.”

  He had clearly that – something – which is not this quality or that quality, but all sorts of qualities summed up into what one calls “character”; personality; a way of impressing silence; a way of impressing the word “damn”; so that if one points to his obvious qualities – his honesty, his unworldliness, his lovableness, his perfect sincerity – one is singling out from a whole single qualities which were part of that whole; and the whole was different from the qualities of which it was made. At any rate, I gather from stories, from memories, that Leslie Stephen apart from his books was a figure; a man who if he came into the room changed what was said and felt; and lived a very real life in the minds of men like Walter Headlam or Herbert Fisher; to whom he was a representative man; a man with a standard they often referred to. If a man like Leslie Stephen likes Tristram Shandy, Walter Headlam wrote to someone, then it must be all right. That gives what I mean.

  And thus as I dribble on, purposely letting my mind flow, I am introducing a picturesque element into the steel engraving; something that one cannot analyse. Was I not conscious of this as a child? Was it not the origin of the love half of my ambivalent feeling? I too felt his attractiveness. It arose – to name some elements at random – from his simplicity, his integrity, his eccentricity – by which I mean he would say exactly what he thought, however inconvenient; and do what he liked. He had clear, direct feelings. He had certain ruling passions. Off he would stride with his sandwiches for some tremendous walk. Out he would come with some fact, or opinion, no matter who was there. And he had very strong opinions; and he was extremely well informed. What he said was thus most respectfully listened to. He had a godlike, yet childlike, standing in the family. He had an extraordinarily privileged position. I twisted my hair, imitating him. “Father does it,” I told my mother when she objected. “Ah but you can’t do everything father does,” she said, conveying to me that he was licensed, for he was somehow not bound by the laws of ordinary people.

  He was a curious figure thus sitting often dead silent at the head of the family dinner table. Sometimes he was caustic; sometimes to Thoby especially instructive. He would ask what was the cube root of such and such a number; for he always worked out mathematical problems on railway tickets; or told us how to find the “dominical number” – when Easter falls was it? And mother would protest; no mathematics, she would say, at meals. Sometimes with an old friend he would laugh, at a college story I suspect, till the veins swelled on his forehead. Yes, certainly I felt his presence; and had many a shock of acute pleasure when he fixed his very small, very blue eyes upon me and somehow made me feel that we two were in league together. There was something we had in common. “What have you got hold of?” he would say, looking over my shoulder at the book I was reading; and how proud, priggishly, I was, if he gave his little amused surprised snort, when he found me reading some book that no child of my age could understand. I was a snob no doubt, and read partly to make him think me a very clever little brat. And I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up and was very gentle and pleased, when I came into the study with a book I had done; and asked him for another. Indeed I was often on his side, even when he was exploding. He had come back, I remember, from a Sunday tramp, smelling airy and muddy in his rough suit, and there on the hearthrug was the stout imperturbable Dermod O’Brien,fn52 in love with Stella, and asked, out of kindness, to stay to dinner. Again my father strode up and down the drawing room, groaning, swearing. He could say much more than anyone could believe without caring if the victim – stout Dermod – overheard. The genius mood was on him; and must be accepted. Did he mind if it wasn’t? For some reason that night while noting my mother’s half laughing deprecation – she was guilty of impulsive hospitality – I shared his mood not hers. You are right, you are right, I kept repeating, surveying the scene from my station on the raised step. I affirmed my sympathy, felt my likeness. And to top it all, though I never saw him with anything like the clarity that I saw my mother, he was, intermittently, especially when his hair was curled in a thick bob behind his ears, a very striking, indeed a magnificent figure; well dressed in his Hill Brothers’ clothes; a swallow tail coat; very lean and tall and bent, with his beard flowing so that his little scraggy tie scarcely showed. His chin I think retreated; perhaps his mouth, which I never saw, was a little looselipped; but his forehead rose and swelled; his skull was magnificent, with a little dent over the arch of the brain, that he made me feel once; and though his eyes were very small, with hairy eyebrows hanging over them, they were pure bright forget-me-not blue. His hands were beautifully shaped; and he wore a signet ring with his double eagle crest engraved on a pale blue stone. As a trifling sign of his indifference to appearances, he went on wearing the ring when the stone was lost. He must have put on his clothes automatically, to the sound of poetry, I expect; the waistcoat was often unbuttoned; sometimes the fly buttons; and the coat was often grey with tobacco ash. He smoked pipes incessantly as he wrote, but never in the drawing room. There he sat in his own chair, with a little table beside him on which was a lamp and two or three books, and my mother sat behind him at her writing table built into a very dark angle of the room;fn53 with Lowell’s snuffers to snuff her candles; and as my father read he kicked his foot up and down, and twisted and untwisted the lock behind his ear. He was always absorbed; often seemed completely unconscious of his surroundings; and lived by rote – that is always at a certain moment would be up and off – upstairs to work, out to walk; every Saturday to visit James Paynfn54; or off to some meeting. And out of doors he strode along, often shaking his head emphatically as he recited poetry, and giving his stick a flourish. He wore a billycock hat always, which sat rather oddly upon that great head with the thick bush of hair flowing out on either side. And I remember him too in very respectable evening dress dining out with my mother; and his black waistcoat had a cord round the edge, and he wore elastic sided boots. “I shall be glad when all this dining out is over, Jinny,” he said to me, standing waiting by the lamp; and I was flattered by his confidence; yet felt that he enjoyed it.

  They dined out quite often in those days, and gave dinner parties too. Indeed for all his unconventionality, he accepted the social conventions so much more completely than we do that I wonder how it is that I feel that he was remote from all that.fn55 It came quite naturally to him to drive off in a hansom in evening dress; he made no bones about dinner parties of eight or ten; and a hired parlour-maid, and a dinner which had ever so many courses and different wines. I can see him taking a lady downstairs on his arm; and laughing. He cannot have been as severe and melancholy and morose as I make him out. He must have made conversation and told anecdotes, and he had, now I come to think of it, a little card case and went calling, like other Vi
ctorian gentlemen of a Sunday afternoon. Undoubtedly I colour my picture too dark, and the Leslie Stephen whom the world saw in the eighties, and in the nineties until my mother died, must have been not merely a Cambridge steel engraving intellectual. He must have beenfn56 an attractive man at fifty; a man who had four small children, and a beautiful wife; a man who came into the drawing room in evening dress and marched off down to dinner with Mrs Gosse, or Lady Romer, or Mrs Booth, or Lady Lyttleton, just as he presided over London Library meetings and went to the Ad Eundem dinner at Oxford or at Cambridge. There was a Leslie Stephen who played his part normally, without any oddity or outburst, in drawing rooms and dining rooms and committees. Still, I cannot conceive my father in evening dress. I cannot conceive him hearing everything that was said, and making jokes and being, of course, an intellectual man, but still a man of that well to do sociable late Victorian world. I remember my amazement, my envy, when the Booths said their father took them to dances. How astonished I felt when Charles Booth said something humorous about “shepherding my flock” and I realised that Charles Booth took Meg and Imogen to parties. When he and my mother drive off in their hansom which Amy has whistled off the rank, standing out in the street in her cap and apron and giving two shrill blasts till the hansom comes trotting – sometimes two hansoms raced each other and disputed which had come first – when they descend the many steps from the front door to the street, he passes beyond my horizon. I have never met anyone who knew my father in evening dress; I have never met him thus dressed in memoirs even. Yet he had great charm for women, and was often attracted, as I could tell from something gallant and tender in his manner, by the young and lovely. The name of an American, Mrs Grey, comes back to me, and my mother somehow conveying to me that I might tease him, as I extricated crumbs from his beard, about “flirting with pretty ladies”. Those were the words I used; and he looked at me not angry, for I was only acting a parrot; still I remember the sudden shock, then he controlled what might have been a snort; and said something emphatic, as if to show me he would stand no jokes about that. There succeeds to that shock a memory of the immense emphasis with which once, when we were disputing were mother’s eyes large or small: “Your mother’s eyes are the most beautiful in the world.” All the same I like to remember, for it gives humanity to his austere figure, that he was so struck, so normally and masculinely affected by Mrs Langtry’s beauty, that he actually went to the play to see her. Otherwise he never went to a play; never went to picture galleries; had no ear whatsoever for music – when Joachim played at Little Holland House, he asked, when is it going to begin? – the Beethoven or the Mozart being to his ears only “tuning up”. In all his life he never troubled to visit Italy or France. Going abroad meant to him solely going to Switzerland to climb mountains; or going to Switzerland to look at mountains.

  Mecklenburgh Square again on a hot summer day, July 1940. Invasion still impends. My bookfn57 is out; and jaded and distracted I return to this free page.

  The sociable father then I never knew. Father as a writer I can get of course in his books; the father who is related to the man’s Leslie Stephen, I suppose. The Leslie whom so many writers and scholars admired, though many thought him cold and sneering; just as many thought him formidable and wild and inapproachable. He is to be found here and there in memoirs. He never spoke a word when Stevenson and Gosse lunched with him, and sat silent with his long cold hands and his fan shaped beard flowing over his breast. When I read his books I get a critical grasp on him; I always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if I’m reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct; to stiffen my fluid vision. I find not a subtle mind; not an imaginative mind; not a suggestive mind. But a strong mind; a healthy out of door, moor striding mind; an impatient, limited mind; a conventional mind entirely accepting his own standard of what is honest, what is moral, without a shadow of doubt accepting this is a good man; that is a good woman; I get a sense of Leslie Stephen, the muscular agnostic; cheery, hearty; always cracking up sense and manliness; and crying down sentiment and vagueness, yet putting in a dab of sentiment in the right place – “I will say no more . . . exquisite sensibility . . . thoroughly masculine . . . feminine delicacy . . .”. That shows a very simply constructed view of the world; and the world was, I suppose, more simple then. It was a black and white world compared with ours; obvious things to be destroyed – headed humbug, obvious things to be preserved – headed domestic virtues. I admire (laughingly) that Leslie Stephen; and sometimes lately have envied him. Yet he is not a writer for whom I have a natural taste. Yet just as a dog takes a bite of grass, I take a bite of him medicinally, and there often steals in, not a filial, but a reader’s affection for him; for his courage, his simplicity, for his strength and nonchalance, and neglect of appearances.

  Through his books I can get at the writer father still; but when Nessa and I inherited the rule of the house, I knew nothing of the social father, and the writer father was much more exacting and pressing than he is now that I find him only in books; and it was the tyrant father – the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternately loved and hated father – that dominated me then. It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast. Suppose I, at fifteen, was a nervous, gibbering, little monkey, always spitting or cracking a nut and shying the shells out, and mopping and mowing, and leaping into dark corners and then swinging in rapture across the cage, he was the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in a corner of the cage.

  Now I shall try to describe the cage – 22 Hyde Park Gate – as it was in July 1897. Two nights ago I lay awake in Mecklenburgh Square going over each of the rooms. I began at the basement; in the servants’ sitting room. It was at the back; very low and very dark; there was an ottoman covered in shiny black American cloth along one wall; and a vast cracked picture of Mr and Mrs Pattle covered the wall above it. I remember a very tall young man with tight trousers strapped over the instep, and white socks. It was relegated to the room because it was so big, so cracked, so bad – compared with the Watts portraits upstairs. One could hardly see it – who was the woman? I cannot see her – or anything else; for the creepers hung down in front of the window, in summer strung with hand-shaped semi-transparent leaves. There was an iron trellis to support them, and outside the little, dust-smelling, patchy square of wall-circled back garden. I remember the wood cupboard in the passage; piled with bundles of fire-wood tied with tarry string; once when I rummaged there for a stick to whittle, two eyes glowed in a corner, and Sophie warned me that a wild cat lived there. Wild cats might have lived there. The basement was a dark insanitary place for seven maids to live in. “It’s like hell,” one of them burst out to my mother as we sat at lessons in the dining room. My mother at once assumed the frozen dignity of the Victorian matron; and said (perhaps): “Leave the room”; and she (unfortunate girl) vanished behind the red plush curtain which, hooped round a semi-circular wire, and anchored by a great gold knob, hid the door that led from the dining room to the pantry.

  It was in the dining room, at the long baize covered table, that we did our lessons. My mother’s finger with the opal ring I loved pointed its way across French and Latin Grammars. The dining room had two little windows filled with bottle glass at one end. Built into the alcove was a heavily carved sideboard; on which stood a blue china dumb-waiter; and a biscuit tin shaped like a barrel. The room smelt slightly of wine, cigars, food. It was lit also by a skylight, one pane of which lifted in a wind and made me shiver, lest it should crash on our heads. Round the walls hung Sir Joshua engravings; in the corner on a pedestal of mottled yellow marble stood the bust of the first Sir Jamesfn58 – an eyeless, white man who still presides in the hall of Adrian’s house in Regents Park. It was a very Victorian dining
room; with a complete set of chairs carved in oak; high-backed; with red plush panels. At dinner time with all its silver candles, silver dishes, knives and forks and napkins, the dinner table looked very festive. A twisting staircase led to the hall. In the hall lay a dog, beside him a bowl of water with a chunk of yellow sulphur in it. In the hall facing the front door stood a cabinet with blue china; and on it a gold faced clock. In the hall was a three-cornered chair; and a chest in which rugs were kept; and on this chest was a silver salver deep in visiting cards; and a plush glove for smoothing the silk of George’s and Gerald’s top hats; and I also remember nailed over the fire place a long strip of chocolate coloured cardboard on which was written: “What is to be a gentleman? It is to be tender to women, chivalrous to servants . . .” – and what else I cannot remember; though I used to know it by heart. What innocence, what incredible simplicity of mind it showed – to keep this cardboard quotation – from Thackeray I think – perpetually displayed, as if it were a frontispiece to a book – nailed to the wall in the hall of the house.