Left Hand, Right Hand!

The autobiography of SIR OSBERT SITWELL

LEFT HAND, RIGHT HAND!.

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

INTRODUCTION

ALL works of art that are purely imaginative — poems, novels, stories — are pulled out of the future as you may pluck a roasted chestnut out of the fire, scorching your hand in the process. But in this cruel and meaningless epoch, between the bars of which I now write, neither past nor future seems to have any existence; only the present, which contains the dead ashes of the past. Since the whole of life and its background is being dissolved to chaos before our eves, it is impossible — because our balance from day to day remains too precarious — to wrest a book from the future. In consequence, I have resolved to start the story of my life, to describe some of it and some of those who have figured in it.

No biography is easy to write and, because we know more of ourselves than of others, autobiographies are the most delicate of approach. Of the kind of book that I want to write, I will treat in a moment. But first it is necessary to explain that I had the fortune to be born toward the sunset hour of one of the great periodic calms of history. So placid was this brief golden halt that often as a small child, passionately addicted to reading books of history, I used to wonder whether its stream had not altogether dried up. The Diamond Jubilee, the Boer War, the Edwardian Decade, none of these, viewed separately, was history — indeed the Jubilee was a sort of official celebration of its death. Nothing had happened for so long, and nothing would happen again: nothing. (But life seems static to all children, even those of the present day. Such is their innate confidence in parents, that it is only necessary for the father to dismiss an aircraft, in the very act of dropping bombs, as “one of ours,” for the children immediately to believe him and regain their sense of security.)

Everything was calm and still and kindly. Yet as I listened sometimes to the complacent chatter of my nurse, while she sewed new ribbons on to a new lace cap and, in my presence, talked about me to my mother’s maid over the hum of the sewing machine (I can smell the warm, oily smell of it as I write), saying how lucky I was to be an elder son of such parents, and therefore of assured prospects, growing up in a world which had improved, because of Queen Victoria and the benevolence of all members of the British race, beyond what anyone could have expected, and held in it no possibility of deterioration even though the general progress was occasionally impeded by the spite of foreigners such as Kruger — how lucky to be born exactly then and thus, and not in any other age; at such moments a very strong doubt, arising from the wisdom of the blood, that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us, used to assail me, and I would wonder, “ But am I; is it true?” prompted by a precocious spirit of contradiction which has its good as well as its bad side, being the fount of such wit as I can show.

Notwithstanding, it is to that halcyon age in which I grew up that now I turn; years in which human life had a value set upon it, inalterable as it seemed then, and when the ape, so cleverly fitted in just under the skin of each human being, was a secret taint of which to be ashamed, a shadow, the mere glimpse of which would frighten the bravest man, and not, as now, an ideal to be extolled and after which to struggle. Vaguely people still talked with horror of the Siege of Paris; the only thing, real thing, that had happened within memory.

But that, after all, was an incident in French history, and, as such, perhaps should have been looked for: it had not affected us except to make rich English merchants and hotel proprietors yet, and still more justifiably, richer. It had been dreadful, though, — everyone admitted that, — and out of keeping with the times. And my Aunt Florence kept, I remember, as a reminder of the depths to which human beings can come, a kind of memento mori, a piece — given her by a former French governess — of the bread that the people ate in the beleaguered city. Straw-colored and apparently petrified, it stood as granite, and in those days constituted the sole evidence of human cruelty. It was, I want to emphasize, necessary to remind oneself. But in the years that have followed I have watched the endless massing of the apes for conflict.

I should like to emphasize that I want my memories to be old-fashioned and extravagant — as they are; I want this work to be as full of detail, massed or individual, as my last book, of short stories, was shorn of it — had to be shorn of it because of its form; I want this to be gothic, complicated in surface and crowned with turrets and with pinnacles, for that is its nature. I mean it to be full of others besides myself and my brother and sister, giving scenes and divertissements, crowded with people of every sort: for I have always found friends and, perhaps because of my origin, coming of a family that has lived within three miles of the room wherein I now write, for at least seven hundred years, I have never experienced that sensation of being separate from the working classes, in the way in which the city-bred, middle-class poets of the proletarian movement continually proclaim themselves to feel cut off, deploring in foot-sore meter, often very justly, their own stiff collars and priggish, coy, self-conscious silence. No, we all here draw our strength from the same soil, and my friends recognize it.

I have seen many people in many countries, and will write of some of them. In descriptions of persons, it is often difficult not to give offense, but I shall try for the most part to avoid it. In a former book I showed new people in lands new to me, and endeavored to evoke the age-old life of the Chinese against the threadbare golden expanse of their country: now I am setting myself to the task of bringing out the equal fantasy and beauty that are to be found in people and objects familiar to us from birth, these qualities being only obscured for us by their vicinity or the custom of many centuries, and to prove that English life, today and yesterday, often contains as much power and character as when Chaucer first presented it in a new language.

What strange customs and ceremonies we have been privileged to see. Never before, for example, has there been a period when the style in which the women of the richer classes dressed changed completely every year — and latterly, in the two decades between the wars, every three months. What fantastic, what beautiful people have been provided for us to see and know. Though Shelley and Pope and Shakespeare have long been dust, we have all of us been given the chance of passing in our own streets Yeats, than whom no human being could look more noble, with his sweeping gray-white mane that appeared to be almost blue, and his fine and enrapt features, or of seeing the octogenarian Bernard Shaw striding down Piccadilly in all the vigor and sparkle of his unending youth.

Though Cezanne and Seurat, though Schubert and Brahms, lived before we were born, we have been able to sit in the same room as Picasso and Matisse and Tchelicheff, as Ravel, Stravinsky, and Debussy. On the stage, too, we have watched Chaliapin and Nijinsky, Karsavina and Duse; artists whose merits those of my generation must sing, whose memory they must make an effort to preserve for posterity. How often lately have I not been asked by those half my age in what manner Nijinsky could have surpassed the dancers of the present day, and, although I also in my youth had not believed in the superior skill of, let us say, Taglioni over Karsavina when extolled by my elders, and had been irritated at the idea of such a presumption, have yet found mvsclf lost before these depths of tragic ignorance.

First I must essay, in order to effect a portrait of an age and person, to show how a child of such a family as mine should have developed, what his background was, as well as how he did, in fact, evolve.

Before I begin, and all the trumpets blow, only one point remains: I must explain the title I have chosen. The whole work is called Left Hand, Right Hand! because, according to the palmists, the lines of the left hand are incised inalterably at birth, while those of the right hand are modified by our actions and environment, and the life we lead. But, because I phrase it after this manner, — the name so perfectly expressing the purport of the book, and the sense I wish to convey, — and although I believe all men, including myself, to be superstitious, do not, gentle reader, conclude that, except in so far as any attempt at divination is more apt to catch the glint of the future than if none at all were made, I accept the childish boundaries of chiromancy.

1

THE garden would be beautiful — and is beautiful — when no flower blooms there. Though this lovely country teems with industry, every prospect is idyllic, and chimneys in the distance become tall obelisks. Its architecture does not consist so much in stone walls and paved walks as in green walls of yew and box. If you stand with your back to the large old house and face due south, on your left, behind and below the formal arrangement of beds and statues and fountains and yew hedges, lies the Wilderness, part of a wild garden surviving from the eighteenth century, with dark, mysterious cut glades, and at the end of them, far away, a golden cornfield in which in August and September you can just descry the turreted sheaves.

Here in spring, when the trees are burgeoning, the ground is covered for three weeks at a time with the azure snow of bluebells, and later, in the summer, you find the tall, overweighted spires of wild Canterbury bells, no doubt descended from flowers escaped long ago from older enclosed gardens of monasteries and manors. On your right hand towers up the Avenue, a piece of formal planting, old elms alternating with limes, surviving, it is said, from 1680. To the south, in front of you, the garden descends by level, terraced lawns and green platforms, each with its piece of water, pool or fountain, to the outer green terrace, which commands a wide view of the lake, lying far below, and of a sweep of beautiful country rising up beyond it.

The gimcrack, tangled battlements of Barlborough, which have yet stood so long, show near at hand among the green mounds of the fat-leafed treetops, while, on the horizon, you can distinguish the lofty stone keep of Bolsover, jutting like a cliff, its windows burnished every evening by the setting sun, and, on a clear day, the three tall towers of Hardwicke, perhaps the most beautiful Elizabethan house in England, a skyscraper of glass and golden stone. A little to the right, the view ascends toward the Peak, so that in the distance are the shimmering faint outlines of what, for England, are mountains. On each side of flights of steps, stone statues of Neptune and Diana, and of two giants, gaze outward from the house toward this superb and romantic prospect bound together by the glint of water — pool and lake and fountain.

Often you would wonder which is the most beautiful moment in this garden — at noon, on a hot summer day, when the light reflected from the water quivers in dazzling patterns upon statues and walls, and upon the warm velvet of the lawms, or on spring mornings when in their mist the trees are towers of crystal, each twig a glittering vein in it, or later, when whole rival choirs of birds practice within them, and every twig is unfurling a golden and transparent pennon; on summer nights when you feel its mystery as at other times you feel its joy, — for in the manner of all gardens it is a little haunted, with the mystery of stillness and space and silence, a rustling sense of expectancy that, though alarming, is not disagreeable, — and then, a miracle that can only occur in this neighborhood, the whole sky flames out from the furnaces, and the sighing, tall summer trees and the dark walls of the hedges smolder in the fierceness of this light until, after a minute or two, the flares subside and the world settles to darkness again, the white owl snores once more in her moated grange, the hollow tree upon an island, and the startled bats fly home in arching, segmented flight; or in the early mornings of October, when the mists and cobwebs natural to a Derbyshire fine morning at that season are being brushed away by the sun, which, nevertheless, all day long, seem a little tarnished, so that everything, every stone and trunk and dying, gilded leaf, takes on a hue of deeper and decaying gold.

But this is the pompous month of August — a month of an unnatural length ordained by t lie pride and caprice of an Emperor nineteen centuries ago — and the early, the very early, morning. Already, however, the light summer mists have evaporated, the distances are visible, and at the end of the long, somber aisles of the trees, upon the sides of the hills at which they are pointing, the pale yellow glint of cornfields twists in and out of the nearer pattern of green leaves like the Arabesque by Schumann. And already, too, a tall man, fair and with a curious air of isolation, is out there upon the terraces.

My father is very fond of walking, extremely rapidly, in these gardens he has made. All day long he can be found in them: and this year, into which I lead you, he is there for a longer time than ever, because to him the Middle Ages are the model for all life to follow — hence the isolation you noticed, for he lives behind invisible barriers of pedigrees and tourneys and charters and coats-of-arms, mid all round him hang its shields and banners, all round him sound its discordant trumpets and the battle cries of armored men — and since every medieval romance opens in a garden at the hour of sunrise, he has, this summer, chosen to be called every morning at five. But, though he has his share of the proselytizing spirit and is eager that others should benefit from the same experience, he is still alone. But this, in itself, in no way irks him.

He walks up and down, surveying his work, which will never be finished, his head full of new projects of sun and shade, but never of flowers, measuring the various views with a stick to his eye or a pair of binoculars. Sometimes he is planning a boat of stone upon the lake, or a dragon in lead, writhing for a quarter of a mile through its level waters, or a colonnaded pavilion upon another island, or a Roman aqueduct in counterfeit to frame the prospect with its elongated arches, or a cascade to fall down a stone channel for a hundred and fifty feet, from the water to the garden below; and, for projects such as these, though most of them never materialized, he would cause wooden towers, built up of planks and joists and beams — like an early machine for siege warfare or a drawing by Piranesi — to be erected here and there at the right points of vantage. In the summer he would spend many hours aloft on these platforms, with a large gray hat or gray umbrella to shield his light-colored skin and eyes from the sun, and with a telescope to his eye, enjoying the air and also, perhaps, the feeling of command which such an altitude above the ground affords.

Then he descends preoccupied, recognizing, if it is by now the hour of social activity, no one whom be passes, and walks up and down the terraces again, pausing occasionally to contemplate a vista lately cut. If it is past eightthirty in the morning — for to his sorrow he “cannot induce the fellow to follow the right plan and be here by six” — he will stop occasionally to talk to his agent, ever and again asking, after surveying the model for some new box-edged, formal beds or the possibility of a new perspective, “How much can we twist this, without being found out?”

All my life, these have been his ways, in one place or another. He made the great garden layout at Renishaw just before I was born, and I grew up, year by year, with its yew hedges. I never remember a time between the ages of three and seventeen when we were not the same height, though now they overtop me, and this is a privilege and rare experience for which I have him to thank. Indeed, though he has written many books — of which, perhaps, the best and best-known is, happily enough. An Essay on the Making of Gardens — it is as an artist in levels and lawns and vistas and lakes that he lives and will survive.

2

AT ANT rate, one fine summer morning, when the yew hedges were about four feet high and I was about nine years of age, he raced me at a tremendous pace up and down the Avenue, telling me of various relations of his in the past. I can see now the wide expanse of lake and woodland — nowhere else in England can you find such contrasts in the sky, such dramatic effects of cloud and sun and smoke — high over which flew the proud streamers from the mines. Suddenly he stopped talking of these dead lives, and said, as though to himself — and, indeed, I had not been paying much attention: —

“It’s quite evident, if you read the family letters, that we’ve been working up toward something for a long time, for well over a century.”

He did not, I think, realize fully the implications of what he said, — though as he said it, I experienced a slight, lifting of the heart, — for his mind, though in many directions so very unconventional and gothic, displayed certain strata of intense conventionality, and he did not think of writers when he made this pronouncement, — for writing was to him only an incidental accomplishment, part of the general make-up of a cultured man, — and doubtless in his heart, he dreamt of colonial governors and proconsuls, supreme over the wastes and teeming cities of an empire, shining somewhere among his descendants, among his great-grandchildren — for he was interested more in ancestors and descendants than in sons and fathers.

Mothers and daughters were worse still. Thus, when he talked of the “family,” he was indicating, of course, his own, and not his mother’s, or my mother’s; for the English tradition regards every child born in wedlock — just as it considers a bastard as having no father, only a mother and, therefore, no ancestors — as being solely his father’s, descended from his father and his father’s father. The mother’s family do not enter in, bear no responsibility, and derive no credit. My father, however, frequently noticed, and never failed at the time to mention with distaste, traits, physical and otherwise, occurring in me which he had observed in members of my mother’s family — directing attention to them, too, with a sour look, as though I had in some way broken all the rules of the game of heredity and as though they were evidence, also, of original sin. And, as time went on, this unfortunate embodying of other characteristics besides those belonging to himself and his own family was to be one of the great troubles existing between us in our relationship.

Yet it may well be that some qualities vital for achievement in the arts were transmitted through my mother, though she herself set so little value on this side of life. Artistic creation, like any other form of creation, is born of energy, is connected with the body and the backbone and the blood, being in no way merely cerebral. Thus it is important for the creator to have sources of energy that have not been tapped, to come of blood, at any rate in part, that has not been obliged to endure too great a strain upon it; an artist — not a cultivated lover of the arts— flowers best when the blood flows most freely in the veins, from stock that has not, intellectually, been overworked. To generalize, governesses are the friends of culture, but the foes of the artist: and, to particularize, were Mrs. Humphry Ward my aunt, as she is my friend Mr. Aldous Huxley’s, and Matthew Arnold my great-uncle, and Dr. Arnold my great-grandfather, and Thomas Huxley my grandfather, I should find the joys of artistic creation attenuated and not easy to capture; but I should be more cultivated.

My mother’s acuteness of the senses was much stronger than my father’s. Her love of pleasure, her sensual delight in driving through summer woods at night, catching their scent and feeling their cool air, had much of a child’s, and perhaps of an artist’s, feeling in them, as, too, had her swift seizing on the peculiarities of people and places and her vivid gift of instantaneous mimicry, keen and acute imitations which she couid do once but never again. The kindness and cruelty in her seemed without reason or basis. She was so impulsive. Only yesterday, I found some letters of hers written to me nearly thirty years ago, when I was a young officer in the Brigade of Guards. In one of them she wrote, “I must have a large bunch of white Parma violets.” stressing it as though it were a point of the utmost importance to her, causing me no doubt to search all over London for them.

Her love of flowers, especially if they were strongscented, was overwhelming: the rooms, summer and winter, were crowded with lilies and tuberoses and stephanotis, and, from the time I can first remember her, she always wore at her waist gardenias or tuberoses, with sweet geranium leaf, so that I always associate her with their scent, and if I were to smell them now, should expect to hear her footstep or see her come into the room; and this strong physical emphasis of the senses, may not this, too, be connected with the perceptions of the artist? Certainly it was hereditary, for my mother would tell me how, when she and my aunts used to drive in Hyde Park with their mother, my grandmother would say, suddenly, “Oh dear, there’s a, Chinaman somewhere near!” And sure enough, after a few minutes, they would see a figure in long robes and a pigtail — for Chinese then really wore pigtails — approaching beneath the trees.

Such slight but curious characteristics, altered and exaggerated, may play a much more important part than one would imagine in the make-up of descendants, and be transmitted in one family, or from one family to another, for many generations. But “form” may only be studied now in horses, not in men. (If racing were truly democratic, the race would go to the tortoise.) I recollect a visit a few years ago to Haddon, which — for it is situated about twelve miles from Renishaw — I had known, when a child, as an immense gray, deserted house, one of the most beautiful shells in the world: everything in it then was bone-colored, or the color of ivory or wood-ash, but, though it was the oldest unfortified residence in the country, no one, I think, expected to see life come back to it, apart from the uncongenial, invading hordes of tourists who at that time trampled through its paneled galleries to the accompaniment of a custodian’s whistle, as she marched her gaping army in rough formation from room to room.

But life returned to it after more than two hundred years, for its owner perhaps felt in his own blood the same call which had moved his ancestors to dwell there. It looked no less lovely when lived in again, and at dinner I asked the sister of the owner, my old friend Lady Diana Cooper, next to whom I was sitting, if she was not very attached to it, and she said yes, adding, “But roots are out of fashion now.” So they were, and so. more than ever, they are; but though hidden, they can still strengthen, just as they can on occasion enfeeble the character.

Who knows whence come the various traits of sensibility? Ancestors stretch behind a man and his nature like a fan, or the spread tail of a peacock. At every turn, in every gesture and look, in every decision he takes, he draws on the reserves or deficits of the past. Every human being, the first man marching ahead of the endless ape armies of prehistoric times, you and I, no less than our descendants, is the heir of all the ages, poised on the perilous brink of time. Every single human being, the criminal or mentally weak, no less than the great poet or the great soldier, is the culminating point of some experiment, worked out by life forces beyond our knowledge and control over a span of a million — but the figure is arbitrary, it may be a thousand million — years. Thus, though a man maybe negligible as an individual, he is, notwithstanding, of a certain experimental interest.

Countless radiations from our descent help us to modify our environment. Whatever position in life by chance we occupy, all these diverse rays of lineage center in every human being. Our ancestors, whether we know who they were or not, roll away at gathering speed into the past, at times taking us with them. From our summits, turning to look back, we can see them fading into the distance, the perspective diminishing, head by head, individuals merging in the crowd, and beyond that into the misty ramifications of history.

Thus each of us, when the English freedom concerning a choice in marriage is taken into account — and though this choice was formerly, until the end of the eighteenth century, more limited, it was always wide when compared with foreign, class-bound nations — is a synthesis of his race. Even if in reality the romantic marriage is no more conducive to happiness than the Continental marriage of convenience, it does at least afford us that fascinating mixture of blood which in England constitutes the aristocratic tradition.

Let us, therefore, stop to look back and scan the mist out of which three writers have emerged — or, rather, let us survey those figures that, though they still stand out clearly in the foreground, have attained something of heroic exaggeration. The mist of oblivion drifts up at them, it is true, obscuring them a little already, yet it makes what we can see of them loom out at us with an unnatural and overwhelming immensity. Let us glance rapidly at collateral as well as direct ancestors, so long as they stand near the main line of descent, since a man often resembles his uncle more strongly than his father. And let us first, before examining more intently the faces that are still almost close to us and easily recognizable, survey, too, for the instant, the Various gleaming points, high or low, in the haze behind us, ihe eyes of the peacock tail of which I have spoken and which each of us carries.

They stretch behind one, these ancestors, as I have said, at a gathering speed: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, until already, in the tenth generation, a man possesses ten hundred and twenty-four of them. These figures form a cloud of witnesses in us, by whom they survive, testifying to our physical and mental heredity — even though the number is less than at first it seems, since the marriages of cousins, from time to time, affords the same ancestors. In the palaces of Germany and Austria and Italy we may often see sets of portraits of ancestors ordered by the ruling princes of small states: these usually begin, at some period during the eighteenth century, with real faces, recognizable faces, human and self-indulgent, but beyond the third generation become just a pack of royal portraits, painted obviously from a single model, like the kings and queens on playing cards, with all the attributes of their sovereignty, scepters and robes and crowns, with different-colored hair and eyes given them, but otherwise with nothing individual about them except their names on the canvas; so it is in life.

Beyond our grandparents, whom most children have known, have stared at and talked to, these men and women enter the realm of personal reminiscence (and how little, even of that, we remember; how much, afterwards, when it is too late, we wish we had tried to impress it more deeply upon the memory). Beyond our greatgrandparents, about whom their sons and daughters have told us, so that we know their manner of speech and dress, their peculiarities, and in their children have heard their voices reflected, and have even, perhaps, lived in the rooms in which they lived; beyond them, then, our relatives enter the realm of myth, their faces lose their identity and no longer connect with those round us. They have become ancestors. The point at which this disintegrating but formalizing process begins is with our great-great-grandfathers: they and their sons are the crucial generations. and about them I propose to tell the reader the little I know.

Fortunately these men and women possessed plenty of character of one sort and another; and for my illustration of it, I have at my disposal an unusual amount of authentic personal material, in many cases diaries and journals, upon which to draw. So now, gentle reader, let us approach them more nearly, seeing who they were and what currents of life run in them, and thus, perhaps, in me, thereby coming to understand what I might have been and what I am: Left Hand, as we are born; Right Hand, as we make it.

3

SIMON CYTEWET, son of Walter, was settled like his father before him — so the summary of a lawsuit of the time, concerning the ownership of land, reveals — in Ridgeway, on the hillside opposite Renishaw, and about three miles distant from it, in 1301. It was not until 1625 that a George Sitwell came to live at Renishaw, a site which he had inherited from a great uncle. Robert Sytwell, who, although an adherent of the old faith, had contributed to the fund for the defense of the country against the Most Catholic King’s Armada.

On the tableland in question, George Sitwell built a tall stone bouse of three stories, crowned with gables and battlements, and surrounded with garden courts, full of intricate designs in box and of stone obelisks; a house that was as typical of its period and district as was its situation, for elsewhere houses were still more generally built for shelter in the valley. When I was a boy old men would point out to me the mark of cannon bails upon the stone of the upper stories (their fathers had shown them these traces of former poundings), and though I found it difficult identify them, George Sitwell had been, certainly, a staunch royalist —indeed, in the Commonwealth, he was called upon to give up being Sheriff of Derbyshire because of his opinions — arid the house had been garrisoned for the King in the Civil Wars.

It is, though, my great-great-grandfather with whom we are concerned. When, at the age of twenty-two, in 1793 he inherited from his father the house together with a large estate and fortune, one room had been added to it, and a gothic appearance had been imposed by the removal of gables and by the substitution everywhere of battlements, and an emphasis upon them where they already existed. The old gardens, too, had been leveled to the idyllic landscape taste of the time. But the interior, apart from the furniture and pictures deposited there by successive generations, remained much the same as when the house had been erected.

As the proud repetition of his name suggests, Sir Sitwell Sitwell seems to have been a very typical figure of the Regency. How he had met her I do not know, but he had as a boy fallen in love with Alice Parke, the beautiful daughter of a Liverpool merchant of yeoman stock. Because he was heir to many thousands of acres and an old name, his family did not approve of the proposed match. In order to render him forgetful of the girl he loved, the young man — then nineteen — was sent on a Grand Tour designed to be even more extensive than usual, and, of course, with a tutor to guard him. When he arrived at Constantinople, the farthest point in his travels, a letter reached him from his old aunt, Miss Warneford, breaking the news that Alice was dead; a cruel stratagem to aid oblivion. But it produced the opposite effect; distracted, he at once set off for home and, arrived there, found her alive! Touched by the devotion he had shown, his father gave consent for the young couple to be married. His wdfe, as two portraits of her — and especially the exquisite painting by Sir William Beechey — show, was a very beautiful and graceful woman. From the point of view then prevalent, the marriage turned out better than his family had expected, for Alice’s brother rose to fame as a lawyer and judge, becoming Lord Wensleydale, his grandchildren numbering among them the 1st Viscount Ridley, the present Viscount Ullswater, and the 9th Earl of Carlisle.

Apart from her portraits, we know little of Alice. She died six years after her marriage and, alas for constancy, her husband married again within fourteen months of her death. His new bride was Caroline Stovin, the celebrated bluestocking Lady Sitwell, the friend of every literary man from Byron to Longfellow.

The best likeness of Sir Sitwell is that contained in “The Sitwell Family,” by Copley, which portrays him at the age of sixteen with his sister and his two younger brothers. Tall and well-built, his high color and full lips, his very attitude, indicate his characteristics as they have reached us from more distant sources: impulsiveness, high spirit, taste, audacity, and temperament. He was a friend of Pitt’s and represented for a time the Cornish rotten borough of Westloe in Parliament. But, typical of the age in which he lived, his existence, as I have said, was chiefly divided between sport and building, the two curses of my family, though as a rule not to be found united in a single person, but ruining alternate generations. He kept two packs of hounds, one at Renishaw and the other across the Yorkshire border, and the blood of his mares and stallions still runs in the veins of the best race horses of today. His colors were known on all the chief courses in England, and his private racecourse stood at the end of the park, its situation being now occupied by a coal mine. (As a boy, I was given the huge gold stopwatch with which he there timed the pace of horses, but I have long ago lost it.)

His hunting exploits, like those of his youngest brother, Frank Sitwell of Barmoor Castle, were many and famous. The most fantastic incident at Renishaw — only to be matched, indeed, by the even more exotic episode in the time of his son, which I shall relate shortly — occurred early in November, 1798, when a “Royal Bengal Tiger” escaped from a menagerie in Sheffield. On hearing of its jaunt, and that it had killed a child, Sir Sitwell “generously went in person, with a few of his domestics, and with much trouble, as well as exposing himself to imminent danger,” subdued and killed the animal with his pack of hounds, as it flashed its cruel tropical streaks through the cool mountain foliage of the Eckington Woods — those hanging woods and deep valleys that were once part of Sherwood Forest, full as they always are at that season of bracken and rowanberries, mingling their gold and scarlet, and of pheasants hurtling through the golden and misty air.

Such tales of Sir Sitwell still haunted the popular memory when I was a boy. Popular with everyone, even with those with whom he tempestuously quarreled upon occasion, stories of his willfulness and high spirit are rife, for he had impressed his personality upon the imagination of the countryside no less by his continual building. He added very largely to Renishaw — for example, he specially erected the ballroom for a rout he gave to the Prince Regent in 1806. Its ceiling has an ornament in the manner of the brothers Adam, which displays in the center the Prince of Wales’s Feathers, and is said to be the first work upon which Chantrey, the sculptor, — who came from the village of Norton near-by, — was employed. He built, in addition, stables and paddocks and gates and triumphal arches (he himself sketched out upon a piece of paper the design for the gothic entrance arch to the park).

For many generations past, the Sitwells had been extravagant in matters of pictures and furniture — and a letter from a friend and neighbor exists, written a hundred years before Sir Sitwell inherited the estate, expostulating with the owner of Renishaw upon his “unheard of" expenditure on such kickshaws. In Sir Sitwell this tendency found its culmination. The marble chimneypieces, which he put in the drawing room and ballroom, are superb.

The famous Perugino, perhaps the finest example of that master, which Sir Sitwell bought — I believe at the sale of the Orléans Collection in London after the French Revolution — was sold by my father a century later to Pierpont Morgan, but the five huge panels of Brussels tapestry by Louis de Vos which Sir Sitwell hung in the ballroom and great drawing room still, at the moment of writing, haunt those rooms with a plumy exoticism of pearls and elephants, garden vistas and trophies that burn in a livid light. The figures within them, clad in somber, rich brocades, golden or crimson, live in a sullen glow such as has never lit earthly beings; just as salamanders were said to be creatures of the flames, so do these exist in their own element, the same to which, intheir cold burning, all jewels belong. These panels must influence the imagination of all who see them, still more of all who have lived beneath them: and so, perhaps, Sir Sitwell to this day influences his descendants indirectly, besides by the folly of his expenditure. For the strain which Sir Sitwell placed upon the family fortune, though that was so large, proved too much for it to bear, and when he died of gout in the head at the early age of forty-two, he left his son a poorer, though certainly not a wiser, man.

Mrs. Swinton, in Two Generations, describes how Sir Sitwell was twice seen after his death, once in the streets of Sheffield, and once — on the same night — at Renishaw, while his body was still lying in the library. It was a very silent evening, after dark, and a relative of his widow was sitting in the hall, next the room in which was the coffin. She heard a ring at the front-door bell and, the servants being at supper, opened the door herself. Sir Sitwell, his face illuminated by the lamp she held up, looked steadily at her from the darkness beyond and then disappeared. The same incident, or something akin to it, has happened on more than one occasion; the face of a man, for example, was seen looking through the door at the time of the funeral of Sir George, Sir Sitwell’s son, some forty years later.

These singular stories possess for me an especial interest, because on the evening of the day on which I first heard of my mother’s fatal illness, I entered the house, having returned from an expedition to Bolsover, to find two friends, who were staying with me at the time, much puzzled because a tall, rather indistinct figure had mounted the steps from the park and stared at them through the identical glass panels of the door; but when they opened it, he was no longer there, nor anywhere to be seen.

4

THE next owner of Renishaw, Sir George, was of a less gay and ebullient disposition, and appears in himself to have anticipated by a decade or two the sentiment of the Victorian Age, into which he survived. Like his father before him, he stood for Parliament, though in this case with some semblance of an election; and for a local constituency. Chesterfield. Indeed his candidature took place during the great Reform controversy. It was a brief episode, but left its own memorial behind it, in a book called Figaro in Chesterfield, a rare volume entirely devoted to abuse of Sir George and his chief supporters; an unusual honor, even in those times of which Dickens, in his account of the Eatanswill Election, gives so unexaggerated an account. For the rest like his father before him, again, he was that contradiction in terms, a “great sportsman,”and though only half his father’s fortune had come to him. liked to spend as much money. Memorials to his love of sport exist in the many paintings of his horses, and one of my great-grandfather himself with his huntsmen and hounds, by J. F. Herring. Sir George, indeed, bad helped this artist to achieve fame. Originally the subsequently celebrated painter of horses was driving a mail coach, and one day he happened to show Sir George, who had the seat next him, his drawings. Sir George, struck by Ins talent, gave him a pony cart and sent him round the country to obtain commissions.

Sir George was among the first English sportsmen to find their paradise in the Highlands, and for some years rented, first Birkhall, and then the old house which existed at Balmoral, before Queen Victoria bought the estate and built the new castle. Both he and his wife are so fully described by their daughter, Mrs. Swinton, in Two Generations that for their picture I will content myself with one small quotation from her. “It must, indeed, have been hard to find a prettier bride . . . when she first arrived at Renishaw, with her showerof golden, or light auburn, curls, her peculiarly slight and graceful figure, her large happy blue eyes, her skin as fine as a baby’s, and cheeks and lips like a rose. Her boy husband was just six foot high, and was also very fair in complexion. He had beautiful teeth, features which were sufficiently regular, and remarkably dark-blue, kindly eyes.”

It must also be explained that Sir George was finally ruined by an unfortunate combination of the expense of his style of living, a catastrophic fall in land values, the failure of the Sheffield Land Bank, — which closed its doors the very day after he had deposited in it many thousand pounds realized by the sale of land, — and the action of the brother of the family solicitor, who absconded with thirty-four thousand five hundred pounds.

During the two years that followed the collapse of his finances in 1846, Renishaw was shut up and many of its treasures were sold. But it is to this period that the other curious incident in its history, to which I have referred, belongs. Below the Wilderness stands a cliff, completely masked by trees — beeches with dark foliage and elephant-gray boles — and full of caves in the rock. Now the leaf mold mounts, and silts them up, so that, though stilt mysterious and dark, they are no longer so large as in the time of which I tell. But though many parks during the eighteenth century possessed caves, containing anchorites, who had been induced to reside there by the considerable salary offered them because of their “picturesque" qualities, none, I think, ever sheltered so strange an inhabitant as was found in one of these.

A few months, then, after my great-grandfather had been obliged to shut up his home, and while he was touring the small towns of Germany (where living was so cheap) with his wife and family, and the great house stood empty, all the more desolate because of the intense activity it had so long framed, the neighboring farmers began to complain of the inexplicable loss, now and then, of a sheep from among their flocks. Sheep-stealing was still a capital offense, but though a sharp watch was kept, the thefts continued at intervals, and the offender could not be discovered. Consternation spread.

Eventually however, one spring day, a year and a half later, and just after another sheep had vanished, a party of farmers, walking along the road that borders the park, observed a spiral of blue smoke ascending over the tops of the tall trees below the Wilderness, and thought it a peculiar circumstance. They decided to investigate, penetrating up the steep, narrow paths under the budding branches along the cliffside. And there, they saw that the smoke issued from the largest of the caves and. entering it, found a tall Negro, naked except for a sheepskin slung round him, roasting part of a carcass over a log fire!

The explanation of this mystery is that the poor creature was one of the last demoded victims of the craze for black servants which during the former century had been so widespread. Brought out of Africa to act as page to Lord Scarsdale at Kedleston, about forty miles away, he had begun to entertain a loathing for white people and the way of life they obliged him to follow. So he had run away, and after several days of aimless but clandestine wandering — for he did not know the country — he had found this unexpectedly secret and secluded retreat. Here he had lived for more than eighteen months, going back to something more like his own method of existence, capturing a sheep from time to time, cooking it, and preparing its fleece as a covering for his body.

To this story, the sequel is happier than might have been expected, since my great-grandfather, a very humane man, by chance returned from his travels just at the time of the blackamoor’s trial and, being chairman of the Bench of Magistrates, contrived, instead of having him hanged, for him to be repatriated, sent back to a joyous, demonstrative meeting with dusky relatives in the torrid zone.

This incident, together with the tiger hunt of fifty years before, always invested the immediate surroundings of Renishaw in the minds of those brought up in it with an air all its own, romantic and pertaining to the world of miracle. How often, as children, Sacheverell and I used to look in the deserted caves for signs of their vanished occupant, bones or the marks of fire upon the rock, or began to clear away the damp accumulation of leaves that partly blocked the entrance of some of them in order to examine the ground. Indeed, for me, it is a story that never loses its fascination. And, as I write this, and look out the window at white and endless perspectives, which, except that they are shrouded by guardian mists — though even these are in part frozen, hanging down from the white branches of the trees — seem to stretch from pole to pole, I still wonder how, accustomed to blazing equatorial suns and hot, languorous nights, that sepia-washed figure contrived to exist through the bitter winters of this part of the world, which, from its proximity to the Peak, often shows its trees encrusted with crystal, and its ground thick with snow, for months together, and how, too, his almost naked body looked, intruding with its sleek brown muscles into these Breughel-like vistas of gray and white, of icicle and iron twig.

5

SIR GEORGE lived on for two or three years after this kindly intervention, but never again inhabited Renishaw. His widow survived to the age of eighty-four, dying in 1880. She was the eldest sister of Archibald Campbell Tait, the subsequent Archbishop of Canterbury, and the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Craufurd Tait of Harviestoun. The Taits are descended from one of their name who is described on his tombstone, erected in about 1680, as a “stonemason.” This has been taken by his descendants to mean an architect. But his father, the great-great-grandfather of the Archbishop, was a gardener — though more distinguished ancestors have sometimes been found for him in pedigrees. Craufurd Tait inherited in 1800 from his father the house and estate of Harviestoun. He was soon at work “improving” it — or, in other words, building and altering as hard as he could, without taking into account the consequences to himself or for others.

“The old house rapidly grew,” writes his daughter; “the improvements which succeeded each other . . . quite changed the face of the country. The highroad ran too near the house — it was moved as though by magic half a mile lower; clusters of poor mean-looking cottages occupied ground too near the back of the house — they disappeared.” In their place. Mr. Tait laid out a garden with Milton’s sonorous version of the Garden of Eden from Paradise Lost as his model.

The attitude of “Let that hill be removed!” which this extract reveals, is well known to me; I grew up with it. (And it must be remembered that to move mountains is easier, often, than to influence those round you, and that the actual moving of them, with the illusion of power it affords — similar to that experienced by Xerxes when he ordered the sea to be flogged — offers concrete compensation for lack of success in other, more human, directions.) The sentiments, the wish to build and lay out, are doubly familiar; for I feel them in my own heart, and have, also, heard them continually expressed, on a basis of the best excuses, round me.

Thus, when reading of Craufurd Tait’s experiments, I cannot doubt that his life, which ended well over a century ago, has influenced my own, both directly and indirectly. I recall, for example, an incident that occurred in 1924, when my father, surveying with an appraising eye the comparatively small garden at Weston, a house then already in the possession of my brother, nonchalantly remarked, somewhat to the surprise of the owner, “I don’t propose to do much here; just a sheet of water, and a line of statues. . . (And then, suddenly, reverting to his other principal interest — medieval times — by, as it were, catching the blue eye of a periwinkle, effected a formal introduction of us to it in the following terms: “The Periwinkle! A charming flower, and a common term of endearment in the Middle Ages.”)

Or I think of a sentence I found lately in a letter, written in 1939 after his retirement, by Henry Moat, my father’s old servant, who was with him for nearly fifty years (of him I shall have much to say later — and shall give many of his letters, for he was a born letter-writer). “It sounds like old times Sir G. arriving at Renishaw with a hundred disturbing plans. When I look back, he never entered any place but he commenced pulling down and building up, in short I have lived among bricks and mortar just like a builder’s yard.” Or I read again a letter, which I found here among the estate correspondence, written by the young subagent to his friend, the agent, in 1911. (In that year my father had sold to Pierpont Morgan for a large sum the magnificent Perugino he had inherited, and this explains the opening sentence.)

“. . . I am wishing Pierpont Morgan to Gehenna, for now all the wild schemes which have accumulated for fifteen years are to be carried out. White, the landscape gardener was here several days last week and Lutyens one day. Already we are moving the entrance to the Chesterfield Approach a hundred yards toward Thirby Cliff. A drive to Foxton Wood is planned which will cut up no end of good arable fields and entirely re-arrange the fences and plantations. Three lakes are to be made in the Eckington Woods Valley. A new drive is to be made through Cadman Wood. A new drive and terrace are to be made though Twelveacre Plantation and Goodness knows what is to be done to entertain a crowd of people in the field between the Woods when Osbert comes of age. The drive is to be continued to the Ford past Never Fear Dam. The Ince Piece Wood is to be re constructed. A swimming-bath is to be made under the waterfall, and the waterfall raised to three times its present height. A ‘crowsfoot vista’ is to be cut in the Wilderness, for which plans have had to be made aud platforms erected to be able to see where they would strike. Terraces are all to be pegged out. A pavilion is to be built in the lake. (Lutyens’ idea is a stone ship.) An extension is to be made at the top end of the lake, ditto near the Sawmill, and the Sawmill is to be removed, etc. etc, etc. What next, I wonder? . . . He is talking quite seriously about this lot. Heaven help us if he does a tithe of it. I find no time for anything except taking levels. Estate work will be in a pretty mess presently.”

Of course, in the case of my father, this urge to build — and especially to build gardens — was fortified by the similar strain, equally strong, which he had inherited from Sir Sitwell Sitwell; but though I little used to think so, now, having studied the facts, I often wonder whether this trait, in many ways so amiable, but which I have seen ruin other families descended from the same blood, may not in reality have been transmitted through many generations from the striving hearts of an obscure Scottish stonemason and his still humbler father, the gardener, and so have no claim to patrician origin. Who knows what schemes in stone and mortar, in trees and flowers, these men may not have dreamt?

From 1814 onwards, for thirty years, the Taits, a numerous sept, frequented Renishaw. Relying on Sir George’s weak, kindly, and sociable disposition to make them welcome, hordes of indigent Scottish relations poured down on it from the north, making it the general headquarters for their various campaigns. Several of the younger of them found here a permanent home. But the burden of the expense thus thrust upon him was undoubtedly one of the contributory causes of my great-grandfather’s ruin, and so, too, has affected the lives of my own generation, for it conditioned my father’s mind to the perpetual fear of being imposed upon, and rendered him continually on the lookout for extravagance in others, and in other than the directions approved by himself. To be financially safe, he felt, one should be friendless, (“Such a mistake,” he remarked to me once, without explanation, “to have friends!”)

Again, for the play of action and reaction upon lives much later in time, it should be remarked that Archibald, my great-grandmother’s youngest brother, was brought up at Renishaw, and this also was not without its consequences. His lameness was cured through Sir George’s sending him to a bonesetter of the period: without which treatment it is doubtful whether he could have filled the office of Archbishop. Subsequently he became my father’s guardian — for my grandfather died when my father was two — and no doubt his ultra-religious zeal was, in its turn, largely responsible for my father’s unbending atheism, the certainty of his conviction. Admittedly his childhood and boyhood were martyred by religion, and Renishaw is still full of holy books, given by the Archbishop, and containing, in his handwriting, exhortations to his ward to attend church constantly.

I once asked my father, I remember, how he had escaped the contagion of the prevalent church fever.

“Well,” he replied, “when I was three or four, I came to the conclusion that I was too young to understand such things properly, and so had better reserve my judgment until I was old enough to form an opinion of my own.” And when he grew up, his lack of conviction assumed a very positive form. He could not be said to “cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.” He was no mere agnostic.

In addition, however, to the suffocating religious atmosphere of his home, an incident, or an adventure, when he was a boy of nineteen, had helped to crystallize his disbelief; he had, during a vacation from Oxford, been one of the two chief protagonists in the first direct exposure of a fraudulent medium. This lady had long been the most famous of her kind, possessed the trust of Sir William Crookes, and was the regular vessel of his psychic experiments; moreover, the séance, in which her body had been found masquerading as a spirit, had taken place at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists itself. Previous to this, it had been given out by the members of the faith that anyone touching a manifestation would die, so that my father’s action in holding the “spirit” and preventing her from escaping had required courage and enterprise. But henceforth, until he became an old man and his attitude softened, indeed completely altered, there were no spirits, no ghosts, neither angels nor devils, no God, nothing behind the scenes, as it were, but the Law of the Survival of the Fittest — and the fittest were those at present in possession.

Nevertheless my father, in spite of his convictions, remained attached to the Archbishop, who was very kind to him. As a boy, when in London, he always stayed at Lambeth, and later, when he first went to Oxford, he was touched by the fact that the Archbishop had written, with his own hand, seventy letters of introduction for him. The Archbishop died before I was born, but I bear him a slight grudge — it would be stronger if I liked port better — because during the long visits of those days, which he paid to Renishaw, he often suffered from episcopal sore throat (an occupational disease, one imagines). Port was then held to be the best disinfectant, and, as only the best appeared in the butler’s eyes good enough for the Archbishop, a bottle of 1815 port, the finest vintage ever known, was always taken up to his room, and he gargled away bottle after bottle, year after year, until the large stock became exhausted.

6

MY FATHER could not recollect his father, Sir Reresby, and though I lived so much with my grandmother, Lady Sitwell, who will often appear in these pages, I know little of him, except that he was a man of strong temper and deep affections, who suffered greatly by tine ruin of the estate. To him, the shutting-up of his old home, and the forced dispersal of much of its contents, came as a shattering blow. In an effort to be helpful, he found that he had made himself responsible for his father’s enormous debts, and that there was no prospect that the property would recover in his lifetime. He had married when his affairs had appeared to be in a less lamentable condition, and the feeling that he could not support his wife and children in the style to which he was accustomed preyed on his spirits. Singularly enough, his early death helped to rectify the position, and during my father’s long minority the estate, owing to my grandmother’s management of it, recovered.

When he was a cornet in the First Life Guards, my grandfather devoted himself chiefly to sport, but he had other sides to him, for he was a friend both of Ruskin and of the philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, and was an accomplished water-color artist. For a few years before his marriage, he had lived alone at Renishaw, only part of it being then furnished. My grandmother did not see the house until she was on her honeymoon. She describes in her diary her first visit, in October, 1857: “I peeped out very anxiously between the trees, as we came near Eckington, but instead of seeing the house, to my surprise we saw about thirty men on horseback with white favors, and flowers in their horses’ heads, they rode in front and on both sides of the Dog-cart, which felt like an odd sort of triumphal car, and drew up in line at the gates and again at the great door to cheer us, and to welcome me. ‘Another cheer for Lady Sitwell, another. I thanked them as best as I could, but was glad to escape to the solemn house. . . . Reresby’s Batchelor rooms are so pretty and so droll, and we had a pleasant evening in them, with Eckington Church bells ringing as if we had all been married that morning, and the wind howling through the empty passages of this huge house. The next morning Reresby tried to show me over it, thereby making me sadly confused in my head, and afterwards I tried to explore alone but could not get it done, some distant door slammed, or the wind howled like a human voice, and back I ran, never stopping till the two boudoir doors were shut behind me.” After a week, they left, to go to Rome. “. . . Frank the gardener made me a parting bouquet of lovely ferns and orange blossom, and I gave my last look at the little boudoir with real regret, and again from the train at the grand old house standing in full sunshine, looking as if it wondered how it could be left, dismantled and deserted.”

When they returned from Italy, they made their home at Renishaw, living in a quiet way there, with much sport and wood-carving — his hobby — and a great deal of religious and charitable activity. But four years later, my grandfather died at the age of forty-two. His widow, sad and lonely, with the responsibility of two young children to care for and the wreck of the Sitwell fortune to nurse back to health, lived thenceforth mostly at Scarborough, only paying visits to Renishaw. And during the years of my father’s minority, by her constant attention and cleverness, she pulled the estate round. She was, indeed, a woman of remarkable ability and charm, with latent fires in her, a great personal dignity, and an inflexible but softly masked will. And with her, we approach a family of whom I believe many members to have been of outstanding character — not necessarily always pleasant.

My grandmother was the daughter of Colonel HelyHutchinson, a brother of the 3rd Earl of Donoughmore. His grandfather, the founder of the family, was John Hely, son of Francis Hely of Gertrough, and he married the niece and heiress of Richard Hutchinson of Knocklofty, whose name he soon added to his own. An eminent lawyer and statesman, and a magnificent orator — as a young man he had been an intimate friend of Quin, and it was said that the great actor had helped him with the preparation of his oratorical effects — he was known as “Silver-Tongued Hely-Hutchinson,” and his portrait by Sir Joshua shows us a man with a certain appearance of fervor and animation. A friend of Edmund Burke and many other celebrated politicians, he possessed as many, and almost as distinguished, enemies. Nobody, I believe, ever attempted to disparage his ability or to deny that he was a most extraordinary character, but he was accused of venality, and his opponents described him as a “harlequin genius” and declared that he had “received more for ruining one country than Admiral Hawke had been given for saving three,” and that he was “so avaricious, that if King George III gave him Ireland one day, he would ask for the Isle of Man the next,” while the Dictionary of National Biography sums up by saying that, in spite of “many public and private virtues,” his political career “was throughout vitiated by an intense and inordinate desire to aggrandise his family.”

In fact, he was a master of the bland art of nepotism, at which many of his nation excelled. As Secretary of State for Ireland before the Union, he enjoyed, therefore, the most interesting and fruitful field for its exercise, and some of the coups he achieved were so remarkable, even in that day, as to seem worth recording. For example, a son of his, Lorenzo, continued to draw army half pay —£133:5:8 a year — long after he had become a clergyman of the Established Church of Ireland, and also long after the Act of Union had been passed. But even this arrangement must have appeared simple in comparison with the other which follows. The Chief Secretary contrived to obtain a commission as Colonel-in-Chief for one of his nieces or favorite cousins.

This young lady never, of course, commanded — or even joined — her regiment; nor, though a colonelcy was a valuable thing to own in days when commissions were articles of commerce, varying in value like stocks and shares owing to the state of the market, did she dispose of it. On the contrary, being evidently no believer in small profits and quick returns, she held on to her investment until her death at an advanced age — though as an old woman she used energetically to denounce the authorities for having, a little while before, removed her from the full-pay list and placed her on half pay.

In 1785 Hely-Hutchinson accepted a peerage for his wife, who was created Baroness Donoughmore. He had six sons, nearly all of whom were remarkable men. The eldest, who had commanded the Cork Legion in 1797, was made an earl in 1800, and was an enlightened statesman and a great friend to Catholic emancipation. After his death, the Catholic Association described him with enthusiasm as “the hereditary patron of the Catholics.” The second son, John, was the real founder of the English power in Egypt. He possessed abilities of the highest order. When Sir Ralph Abercromby went there to take charge of the Army of the Nile, he insisted on HelyHutchinson’s being appointed as his Second-in-Command — perhaps because he so well understood the French Army and French mentality, having been educated partly at the Military Academy of Strasbourg, and later, during the French Revolution, having held an appointment for a time on the staff of Lafayette. After Sir Ralph’s death he took command, and in 1801 turned the French out of Egypt. Bunbury describes him at the time of his great campaign in these rather unflattering terms: “He was forty-four years of age, but looked much older, with harsh features, jaundiced by disease, extreme shortsightedness, a stooping body and a slouching gait, and an utter neglect of his dress.” He shunned “general society, was indolent, with an ungracious manner and a violent temper.” A portrait of him by Phillips, now in the possession of my brother, depicts him on the other hand in his scarlet coat and white buckskin breeches as a goodlooking and elegant man, with a somewhat cynical aplomb; a real eyeglass face; and it seems odd that, if Bunbury accurately describes his characteristics, he should have been so intimate a personal friend of the Prince Regent, that model of worldly elegance. Moreover, all the other members of his family were unquestionably handsome, of a fine, intellectual appearance, and with a look of distinction.

Of his famous campaign, the Dictionary of National Biography remarks that his “movements were at first slow and cautious, but when his plans were formed, he carried them out with great sagacity and success.” On his return to England, the General was granted the resounding title of Lord Hutchinson of Alexandria and Knocklofty, with a pension of £2000 a year attached to it, and, in 1807, was made Military Plenipotentiary in Russia at the time of the Treaty of Tilsit.

From this family, I am sure, my father took much in his make-up, his voice and power of speaking in public, — he was an unusually good public speaker, though he required, to be at his best, a large audience, — his financial outlook and grasp of practical detail, and also his essentially forensic point of view, which enabled him to champion, clad in the shining white armor of unquestionable justice, any cause which happened to appeal to his way of thinking or feeling.

Of Lord Hutchinson of Alexandria’s brother, Francis, and of his wife I know little, except that he, too, like so many of his family, was for some time a member of Parliament, and that she was a cousin of his. Their son, my great-grandfather, from his portraits, was a startlingly handsome and agreeable-looking young man, and his career displays all the adventurous qualities of his family and his race. He ran away from Eton at the age of twelve, and joined a Portuguese regiment, since the English Army would not have him at that age, in order to fight in the Peninsular War. (The Duke of Wellington, his godfather, subsequently obtained for him as soon as he was old enough a commission in an English regiment.) He fought or traveled or lived in Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Italy, and South Africa.

When stationed in Paris in 1814, he formed an attachment for a Polish Countess, a daughter of the Prince de Ligne, who had been married against her will to a man thrice her age, and for a long time they were lovers. Thirty years or more after this liaison had been broken off, when he had become a most respectable married man, reveling in the conventions of the mid-Victorian age, she died, a widow, and left him all the immense Polish estates and possessions of her late husband! At the request of his wife, however, he relinquished these legacies. But when my brother inherited his house, Weston, about twenty years ago, we found in the library, discreetly framed on the inside of a blotting pad, a miniature of Sidonie, portraying her as a radiant young creature, with masses of fair curls and muslins, in the style of the Empire; all that was left of this romance.

During his travels, the Colonel kept a diary. Some of it is in Spanish, which lends it variety, and there are certain erasures made by his wife, and later by his daughters, who acted as self-imposed censors, cutting out any remarks that offended their epochal sense of morality. Even their efforts could not altogether banish from every entry the signs of his susceptible disposition as a young man, but, in spite of them and his extensive travels, the few dull patches that went to the composition of his character — for in life he was apparently anything but dull — all contrive to make, together, a powerful impression in the pages of his journal. Devoted to details of agriculture and commerce, one is irresistibly reminded, when reading it, of Arthur Young, author of the Travels in France, of whom Miss Maxwell has written in a recent book, “When attempting to describe a house, he will give merely the measurements of the rooms, and only the baldest account of the scenery.”

The Colonel had a similar passion for seeing countries, and he is forever measuring statues and basilicas, gardens and waterfalls, battlefields and armies: he even measures the month, beginning the new one with, let us say, “1st November. November has 30 days.” He tots up leagues indefatigably, but the endurance of at least one reader is stretched almost beyond the point of endurance, when, having gone to Russia and Poland, he begins to measure in versts!

In most of the entries, a curious, very British, censoriousness is evident, and I shall now make one or two brief quotations to prove their quality: —

“Lisbon, 27th February (1814). . . . The people are wonderfully altered since I was here the first time. They have entirely left aside the Capote, wear round hats and dress to a degree smart and clean, without anything tawdry, which formerly they valued themselves upon. They ride on saddles made after the English fashion and cut short their poor horses’ tails to make them look English — they ape and endeavour to copy us, and do everything, but to think and act like Englishmen.

“ Sunday 6th March. I went to General Neronha’s funeral. He was buried at 9 o’clock last night with all the honours due to an eminent General, and with the pomp and swaggering of his Nation. Before the body arrived at the Church, the conduct of the spectators was shameful, and shewed a great lack of Religion, and certainly of feeling. The principal people of Lisbon assembled in the Church, and it was more like a Levee than a solemn meeting, everyone talking upon trivial subjects and laughing. During the Service, three gentlemen behind me were engaged in dispute; whether Admiral Martin (by whom I was standing) was a Christian or a Heretic. The firing of the guns from the Castle was fine and awful. . . .”

These entries have a little of the atmosphere of Beckford’s letters from Spain and Portugal, though they are written twenty years after, and have not been touched up, as were Beckford’s. A year later, a laconic entry possesses a certain family interest: —

“Paris, 1816 The month of March passed in a most particularly dull manner. No society, bad weather, no hunting, and my brother in a rascally prison for having helped in saving the life of a Frenchman.”

This last grumble relates to the sentence passed upon his elder brother, John — afterwards 3rd Earl of Donoughmore — for having helped General Count de Lavalette to flee from France. The general had incurred the death penalty by his Bonapartist activities, but on the day upon which he was to be guillotined, his wife dressed him in her own garments and smuggled him out of the Conciergerie in a sedan chair. But Paris was so well guarded by English, Austrians, Russians, and Prussians that he could not succeed in leaving the city.

At last his friends appealed to General Sir Robert Wilson, who was noted for his chivalrous generosity, and he, aided by the two officers Bruce and Hely-Hutchinson, dressed Lavalctte as an English officer and smuggled him in a cabriolet through the barriers and over the frontier into Belgium. “The English gentlemen,” says a writer in the Daily Telegraph, who refers to the incident many years later, “were arrested in Paris and tried before the Court of Assizes of the Seine. . . . They were sentenced to a brief term of imprisonment; but they found their reward in the cheers and embraces of the spectators in court, and in the applause of all liberal France.”

John Hely-Hutchinson was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and was deprived by the King of his commission; but he was soon pardoned and returned to his regiment. His brother, however, continued to regard him as very ill-used.

In the winter of 1817-1818, when he was twenty-seven years of age, my great-grandfather went to Italy, for pleasure and the improvement of his mind. At Weston there is a walnut, each half of which contains a kid glove of Princess Paulina Borghese, Napoleon’s lovely sister, famous for her small hands, though her whole body was celebrated so exquisitely by Canova. Of her he gives a lively account on December 30, 1817: —

“I dined with a beautiful and famous personage, who thinks of nothing but her little handsome person and of her dress. She is illiterate, and amusing when she does not attempt to read Tasso. Her court is made up of Singers, some Sycophants, and of young handsome officers. It is astonishing how people are breaking their heads to get even a sight of her.”

His account of the Roman Carnival, too, is not without charm: —

“7th January 1818. The sight of one Carnival at Rome will, I think, content me for all the rest of my life. Pelting confite is amusing to those who like such fun. The masks are good, but little to say for themselves. The most curious part is to see about twenty thousand — they say forty thousand — people ranged by an impudent soldiery on either side the Corso, a charge of cavalry ensues in the space of a few minutes, and then the Horses, who run from one extreme of the Corso to the other without riders. The last day finished with an exhibition of rather a singular nature, which is call moccotelli. After the Horse-race, the Corso is one sheet of fire — everyone carries lighted candles and the carriages are filled with them. A great noise is heard, crying out ‘Morto chi non porte moccotelli!’ . . . From the Principessa Borghese’s balcony we saw the sight remarkably well, and covered the people underneath with wax — they try to put out each other’s candles, and you will see a Clown blow out the moccotelle of a Princess, and push his way into the carriage to light it again, and perhaps then blow it out a second time. . . . These people are the most good-natured and illiterate fools I ever met; they are just fit to live under their present government.”

At the monumental and magnificent Royal Palace of Caserta, near Naples, two months later, the young Colonel mingled with the disapproval he meted out some enjoyable measuring: —

“The palace has 746 feet in length by 576 in breadth, and is rectangular. It is 113 feet in height with 2 grands étages and 3 smaller. Vanvitelli was the architect. The rascal ought to have been hanged five times over for laying out, or rather throwing away, so much of his country’s money. And it is yet unfinished. The Staircase is fine — the gardens and waterfall, of both of which they so much brag, are quite horrible. As to the Aqueduct, it is nothing to those who have seen Lisbon, Pont du Gard or Llangothlen. . . . I hate kings more than ever.”

It is of a certain interest, besides that which attaches to the difference in feeling manifested between two periods a hundred years apart, to compare Colonel Hely-Hutchinson’s account of the palace with that of his greatgrandson, Sacheverell Sitwell. In the century that had elapsed, Caserta had been forgotten, buried under the dusty accumulation of Ruskin’s crockets, pinnacles, and gothic lace and lavender, and it was my brother’s book —• his first prose work, written at the age of twenty-two, fresh, strange and lovely as the music of Petrouchka — Southern Baroque Art, and especially the essay in it entitled “The Serenade at Caserta,” which again brought sightseers to this shrine of the eighteenth century, when it was said by English travelers “to be the greatest building since Roman times.”

Alas, discursive and disquisitional as I want this book to be, I must nevertheless refrain from a very lengthy quotation, and content myself with the passage which follows: —

“Those who object to the conscription of labour in Russia can take pride in Caserta, built in the last days of despotism. It is the work of slaves, some of them negro, but in great proportion European. This last great work of slave labour is heartless, as you would expect. The staircase, with its ceremonial landing, the chapel and theatre are famed for their marbles. . . . The porticoes leading through the house recall drawings by Bibbiena. Beyond them lie the gardens, rising for two miles up a hill, and of such length as to necessitate a carriage. The innumerable groups of statuary on successive landings along the cascade become monotonous. The water drips down slowly past you, passing from basin to basin, between the two straight roads that border it.

“Arriving at last at the height of the hill, where a mere fall of water into the topmost basin precipitates this small avalanche, there awaits you the biggest and most imposing of the statue groups. But it is the view when you turn round on your ascent which is the culmination of this immense work. Very far down the avenue, just filling the space between its two arms, lies the palace, absolutely still and uninhabited. On the left there is Vesuvius, like an inkpot with a cut-down quill pen in it. Then the eyes naturally travel again down the groove laid for them. The trees of the avenue, as they fade and go smaller in the distance, have the air of gently spinning like tops in a slight mist. But the dropping water and the hot afternoon turn them to hundreds of bells, smaller than almost any leaf. These millions of little tongues are lolling, or beginning to chatter, and the whole volume of their song, swinging as it goes along all the little bells it touches, eventually jumps right off the trees over the palace. And there, in the heart of the mist, over the middle of the palace roof, far enough at sea for this music to be heard, lies Capri, looming out of the mysterious sea like a huge whale’s back.”

Of the landscape so imaginatively described above, all that Colonel Hely-Hutchinson notes is: “The hills around are bleak and naked, with few even of those miserable olive trees upon them.”

In April our traveler had reached Venice, where he indulged in an orgy of measurements and statistics. At the Armory, “the ropewalk has 995 feet in length. The whole is three miles in circumference.” Then, swelling to a mood of Jeremiah-like prophecy, his culminating paragraph runs: Since the revolution there are eighty palaces in Venice utterly destroyed and two hundred houses, the population amounts to only a hundred thousand. . . . There is no commerce of any sort, not a single English flag in the harbour. All foreign productions are prohibited. From January to June the entry made in English vessels was of 4000 tons. From June to November of the same year it had diminished to 300. . . . Before the Revolution there were 15,000 gondolas here, now there are not 4000. In fifty years, Venice will be no more.”

Colonel Hely-Hutchinson’s entries in his diaries of travel become more dry as he grows older, until finally he no longer went so far afield. In the spring of 1825 he married Harriot, the daughter of Mr. William Wrightson of Cusworth, and the widow of Sylvester North Douglas, the only son of Lord and Lady Glenvervie, and thenceforward, apart from long visits to Ireland, divided most of his time between London, where he had a house in Brook Street, and Weston in Northamptonshire. After his wife’s death, he went abroad for a change: he was by that time an old man, and took with him two of his grandchildren — my father and my aunt, then very young. My father told me that, when they reached Brussels, the veteran offered them the choice of a treat: they could visit with him the field of Waterloo, upon which he had fought, or he would take them to a circus. Unhesitatingly, they both plumped for the circus. But the old gentleman seemed in no way put out.

Unlike so many other members of the family, however, Colonel Hely-Hutchinson entertained — as the reader will have deduced from the entry concerning Caserta in his diary — a horror of overbuilding. No doubt Weston, a compact and pretty manor house, appealed to him for this reason. And after his first visit to his daughter at Renishaw — this, it must be remembered, was subsequent to the sale of much of its contents, so that no doubt many of the rooms looked bigger for being so bare — he remarks in a letter, “By whom, or by how many, Renishaw was built, it is a folly.”

(To be continued)

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