Society – upper middle class Victorian society – came into being when the lights went up. About seven thirty the pressure of the machine became emphatic. At seven thirty we went upstairs to dress. However cold or foggy, we slipped off our day clothes and stood shivering in front of washing basins. Each basin had its can of hot water. Neck and arms had to be scrubbed, for we had to enter the drawing room at eight with bare arms, low neck, in evening dress. At seven thirty dress and hair overcame paint and Greek grammar. I would stand in front of George’s Chippendale mirror trying to make myself not only tidy, but presentable. On an allowance of fifty pounds it was difficult, even for the skilful, and I had no skill, to be well dressed of an evening. A home dress, made by Jane Bride, could be had for a pound or two; but a party dress, made by Mrs Young, cost fifteen guineas. The home dress therefore might be, as on one night that comes back to mind, made cheaply but eccentrically, of a green fabric, bought at Story’s, the furniture shop. It was not velvet; nor plush; something betwixt and between; and for chairs, presumably, not dresses. Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress; apprehensive, yet, for a new dress excites even the unskilled, elated. All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazing fire George sat, in dinner jacket and black tie, cuddling the dachshund, Schuster, on his knee. He at once fixed on me that extraordinarily observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Then the sullen look came into his eyes; the look which expressed not simply aesthetic disapproval; but something that went deeper. It was the look of moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of defiance of his accepted standards. I knew myself condemned from more points of view than I could then analyse. As I stood there I was conscious of fear; of shame; of something like anguish – a feeling, like so many, out of all proportion to its surface cause. He said at last: “Go and tear it up.” He spoke in a curiously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male; the voice which expressed his serious displeasure at this infringement of a code that meant more to him than he could admit.
George accepted Victorian society so implicitly that to an archaeologist he would be a fascinating object. Like a fossil he had taken every crease and wrinkle of the conventions of upper middle class society between 1870 and 1900. He was made presumably of precisely the right material. He flowed into the mould without a doubt to mar the pattern. If father had graved on him certain large marks of the age – his belief that women must be pure and men manly; his hatred of strong language – “Damn!” Gerald said once, and up flew his hands in protest; when Rezia Corsinifn88 smoked a cigarette after tea, “I won’t have my drawing room turned into a bar parlour!” he exclaimed – still he smoothed out the petty details of the Victorian code with his admirable intellect, with his respect for reason – no one was less snobbish than he, no one cared less for rank or luxury. But if father had the larger lines of the age stamped on him, George filled them in with a crisscross, with a crowquill etching of the most minute details. No more perfect fossil of the Victorian age could exist. And so, while father preserved the framework of 1860, George filled in the framework with all kinds of minutely-teethed saws; and the machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted in 1900 not only held us tight in its framework, but bit into us with innumerable sharp teeth.
But what material was George made of so that he took the pattern so completely? In the first place, he was almost brainless; in the second he had an abundance of feeling. His physical passions were strong. This mixture was poured into a perfectly adapted physical vessel. He was in a conventional way as handsome as a man could be. He was precisely six foot in height; well proportioned; and, as the old ladies said, well set up in every respect. His eyes were too small and too stupid to light up this great framework. He had over a thousand a year of unearned income. He could supply frock coats, hats, shoes, ties, horses, guns, bicycles, as the occasion required. Thus furnished and equipped society opened its arms wide to him and embraced him. He can never have met with any opposition at Eton, at Cambridge, or in London. He offered none. He had no instinct, no ability to make him stray beyond the circle of the upper middle class world in the evening drawing room. He was never rebuffed or criticised because he never went an inch out of his orbit. Any defiance therefore was unfamiliar to him; and my green dress set ringing in him a thousand alarm bells. It was extreme; it was artistic; it was not what nice people thought nice. Was that the formula, he said to himself, as he saw me come into the room? Did he too feel that it threatened something in himself? Was I somehow casting a shadow in his world; pointing a finger of scorn at him? I do not know. Gerald, I remember, spoke up for me good naturedly. “I don’t agree,” he said. “I like you in that dress.” To my discredit, I never wore it again in George’s presence. I knuckled under to his authority.fn89
It is true that George was thirty-six when I was twenty. And he had [a] thousand pounds [a] year whereas I had fifty. These were good reasons why it was difficult not to submit to whatever he decreed. But there was another element in our relationship. Besides feeling his age and his power, I felt too what I have come to call the outsider’s feeling. I felt as a gipsy or a child feels who stands at the flap of the tent and sees the circus going on inside. I stood in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate and saw society in full swing. I saw George as an acrobat jumping through hoops. I saw him, perhaps with fear, perhaps with admiration. The patriarchal society of the Victorian age was in full swing in our drawing room. It had of course many different parts. Vanessa and I were not called upon to take part in some of those acts. We were only asked to admire and applaud when our male relations went through the different figures of the intellectual game. They played it with great skill. Most of our male relations were adept at that game. They knew the rules, and attached extraordinary importance to those who won the game. Father for example laid immense stress upon school reports; upon scholarships; triposes and fellowships. The male Fishers went through those hoops to perfection. They won all the prizes, all the honours. What, I asked myself, when I read Herbert Fisher’s autobiography the other day, would Herbert have been without Winchester, New College and the Cabinet? What would have been his shape had he not been stamped and moulded by that great patriarchal machine? Every one of our male relations was shot into that machine at the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod over the pampas.
George had not been able to enter the intellectual machine. He tried again and again to enter the diplomatic service, but failed. There was however the other machine – the social machine. That he entered; and he learnt the rules of the game so well and played it so assiduously that he emerged at the age of sixty with a Lady Margaret for wife, with a knighthood, with a sinecure of some sort, three sons, and a country house. In ways so indefinite that I cannot name them, I felt, at twenty, that George no less than Herbert Fisher was going through the hoops; doing the required acts. In a thousand ways he made me feel that he believed in society. A belief which is so commonly accepted, as his was by all his friends, had depth, swiftness, inevitability. It impresses even the outsider by the sweep of its current. Sometimes when I hear God Save the King I too feel a current belief but almost directly I consider my own splits asunder and one side of me criticises the other. George never questioned his belief in the old tune that society played. He rose and took his hat off and stood. Not only did he never question his behaviour; he applauded it, enforced it.
These perceptions, however slight and transient they were then, gave my attitude to George a queer twist. I must obey because he had force – age, wealth, tradition – behind him. But even while I obeyed, I marvelled – how could anyone believe what George believed? There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and o
beyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. The spectacle of George, laying down laws in his leather arm chair so instinctively, so unhesitatingly, fascinated me. Upstairs alone in my room I wrote a sketch of his probable career; which his actual career followed almost to the letter.fn90
But unfortunately, though we could and indeed must, sit passive and applaud the Victorian males when they went through the intellectual hoops, George’s hoops – his social triumphs – needed our help. Here, of course, his motives were – as indeed they always were – mixed. Naturally, at eighteen or so, we had to be brought out. And he naturally, as we had no mother, took her place. What proved unnatural, however, was his insistence that we should go where he wished us to go, and do as he wished us to do. Here the other motive came in; his desire to make us share his views, approve of his beliefs. I cannot even now understand why it was that he attached so much emotion to this desire. No, I puzzle; but I cannot find the true reason. Some crude wish to dominate there was; some jealousy, of Jack no doubt; some desire to carry off the prize; and, as became obvious later, some sexual urge. At any rate this matter of taking us out became an obsession with him. And thus, when the London season began, several times a week we would go upstairs after dinner – after the post had come, the tea had been drunk, and father had gone up to his study – and change into long satin dresses, for which Sally Young would charge fifteen guineas, pull on long white gloves, slip on satin shoes, and snap a row of pearls, of amethysts, round our necks. The cab would be called; and off we would drive along the silver plated streets, for the wood pavements were beaten to silver on a dry summer’s night, to the house where there was an awning, bright windowed, and perhaps a strip of red carpet, and a little cluster of gaping passers by.
Society exerted its full pressure about eleven o’clock on a June night in 1900. I remember the dazed, elated, frozen feeling as the lights beat on me, going upstairs with George following behind. He held his opera hat always under his arm. He would introduce me with his little bow: “And this is my sister, Virginia.” Can I remember anything further – any words, any human emotions? There, at the Savoy, was Mrs Joseph Chamberlain, the very image of womanly charm. We were going to the opera, The Ring; it was broad daylight, and George, with a lack of tact with which he reproached himself afterwards – he would tot up the night’s successes and failures – had placed her opposite the window; and she was then not quite at her prime. Eddie Marsh sat next me, as I now suppose. That night I called him Richard Marsh; and vaguely connected him with fiction. After a pause, he did his duty by me; “What is your father writing now?” A blank occurs. But I visualise my own efforts to keep up the conversation as the wild flounderings and scrapings of a skater who cannot skate. At the Chamberlains’ I sat next to a chubby spruce boy, perhaps a private secretary. We discussed public speaking. “Our host”, he reminded me, for I had been denouncing the death of oratory, “is generally supposed to be a good speaker.” And then on I plunged, and told him – the words come back – that snobbishness, that money making, deserved imprisonment as well as theft and murder. But I had plunged too deep; the glue stuck to my quivering feet. On the steps of a ball room I can see the romantic figure of Geoffrey Young; blue eyed; bland, immaculate. “But how very good of you to have come”, he replied superciliously; for had I not told him that I hated dancing? Then he left me. At Lady Sligo’s I remember pressing some spruce boy to tell me how life was lived in the peerage; whether Garters were taken seriously. Again silence. At the Lyulph Stanleys’ I stood unclaimed against a door. Up came Elena Rathbonefn91 and nailed the coffin of my failure by introducing me to a girl, also partnerless. And soon she discovered, as all my partners discovered, that I could not dance. The humiliation of standing unpartnered returns to me. But at the same time I recall that the good friend who is with me still, upheld me; that sense of the spectacle; the dispassionate separate sense that I am seeing what will be useful later; I could even find the words for the scene as I stood there. At the same time, there was the thrill; and the oddity. For the first time one was in touch with a young man in white waistcoat and gloves; and I too was in white and gloves. If it was unreal, there was a thrill in that unreality. For when at last I came back to my bedroom, it looked small, untidy; and I would ride the waves of these fragmentary feelings – repeat these scraps of talk – say it all over to myself – what I said – what he said – and next morning would still be going over it as I read my Sophocles for Miss Case.
None of this is strange; nor if this had been all would there have been much in these parties to come back to mind. They would have slid off one’s back like so much sparkling water. But there was George. And he made us feel that every party was a test; if a success, then the prize was ours; we had satisfied Lady Sligo; looked lovely; so and so had said I have never seen a lovelier girl and so on. But if it was a failure, then doom was before us; we would fall into the depths of dowdiness; of eccentricity. The importance of the party either way was enormous. But why? This question could not be asked. If, plucking up courage, one of us, opening one of those stiff envelopes with an engraved card on it, should say: “But if I hate going to parties, why should I accept this one?” He would instantly wrinkle his cheek lines; and announce tartly: “You’re too young to pick and choose . . .” There would be silence. Then changing his mood, opening his arms, he would cry: “Besides, I want you to come. I hate going alone. . . beloved. Say you will come?” Duty and emotion muddied the stream. And over that turbulent whirlpool the ghosts of mother and Stella presided. How could we do battle with all of them?
By degrees then these parties, these tests, for which one had to prepare so carefully, became ordeals. “Only three weeks till the end of July I would say,” as the cards arrived. But before the three weeks were over there would be coaxing and hinting; and when the night came, a battle, and Vanessa would stalk off, if beaten, to dress herself in the famous black velvet dress, and George, left in the drawing room, would pace up and down; and protest that he could not take her if she looked like that. And yet other girls would give their eyes to be asked – wherever it was. Did he feel, I return to the puzzle, that we criticised his conception? Was it again the sexual jealousy that fermented in his depths? At any rate, he would run through an astonishing range of emotions about these parties. He would upbraid us with selfishness, with narrowness. Caustic phrases would hint at his displeasure. He complained to his circle of dowagers. He invoked their help.fn92 And he succeeded, of course, in impressing the outsiders. How could we resist his wishes? Was not George Duckworth wonderful? And anyhow what else did we want? Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires – say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously. Even Beatrice Thynne,fn93 when I told her I meant to be a writer, said at once: “I’ll ask Alice to invite you to meet Andrew Lang”,fn94 and when I boggled, thought me excessively foolish.
The division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them. This was partly, of course, due to father’s deafness, which had cut off his intercourse with the younger generation of writers. Young writers, young painters never came to Hyde Park Gate. When Will Rothensteinfn95 somehow drifted into father’s study, he was terror struck. Leslie Stephen opened book after book and pointed silently, trying, apparently, to show him Thackeray drawings. Yet he kept his own intellectual attitude – the old Cambridge attitude – perfectly pure. Nobody respected intellect more. Thus I would go from the drawing room, where George was telling one of his little triumphs – “Mrs Willie Grenfell asked me to come for a weekend. And I said on the whole I thought I wouldn’t. . . She was taken by surprise . . .” – up to father’s study to fetch a book. I would find him swinging in his rocking chair, pipe in mouth. Slowly he would unwrinkle his forehead and come to ground and realise with a very sweet smile that I stood there. Rising he would go to the
shelves, put the book back, and ask me gently, kindly: “What did you make of it?” Perhaps I was reading Boswell; without a doubt, I would be gnawing my way through the eighteenth century. Then, feeling proud and stimulated, and full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming, I would go back to the drawing room and hear George’s patter. There was no connection. There were deep divisions.
Great figures stood in the background. Meredith, Henry James, Watts, Burne-Jones, Sidgwick, Haldane, Morley. But with them again we had no close connection. My memories of them are strong; but only of figures looming large in the distance. I can still see Symonds, as I saw him from the landing at Talland House. I looked down on his crinkled yellow face; and noted his tie – a yellow cord to which two balls of yellow plush were attached. I remember the roll and rear of Meredith’s voice; pointing to a flower and saying “that damsel in the purple petticoat.” I remember still more clearly the ceremony of our visits to great men. For father and mother were equally respectful of greatness. And the honour and the privilege of our position impressed themselves on us. I remember Meredith dropping slices of lemon into his tea. I remember that Watts had great bowls of whipped cream; and a plate of minced meat. “I kissed him”, said mother, “before he dipped his moustache in the cream.” He wore ruffles at his wrists, and a long grey dressing gown. And we went to Little Holland House always on a Sunday morning. I remember that Lowell had a long knitted purse, constrained by two rings; and that a sixpence always slipped out of the slit. I remember Meredith’s growl; and I remember the hesitations and adumbrations with which Henry James made the drawing room seem rich and dusky. Greatness still seems to me a positive possession; booming; eccentric; set apart; something to which I am led up dutifully by my parents. It is a bodily presence; it has nothing to do with anything said. It exists in certain people. But it never exists now. I cannot remember ever to have felt greatness since I was a child.fn96