Victorian Silhouettes
PHILIP GUEDALLA'S Victorian ladies are very pleasant to meet. Of Mrs. Carlyle (to be frank) we are a little tired and
could wish that he had not set her at the entrance of his little picture gallery. Still, she looks very charming on the first page, rolling along in the post-chaise an hour after her marriage, and we feeling really angry with Carlyle when we are reminded that he had with difficulty been dissuaded froir taking her in a stage coach, or giving his brother a convenient
lift, and had actually stipulated that, " by the road as occasion serves, he should smoke three cigars without criticism or reluctance."
Turning over the pages, we come to Mary Arnold, the wife of the great Head Master. She played a large part in the school according to this biographer and a very kind and charming one. " Brides of thirty, united with bridegroom's of twenty-five, may be relied on to assert themselves," as Mr. Guedalla shrewdly observes. The extraordinary happiness of the domestic life here sketched leaves us wondering whether it be true that every woman loves a rake—does she not love a prig better ? It is the vast majority of men, who are neither
the one nor the other, who are apt to find less cause for gratitude. After her husband's death Mary. Arnold's life was over, too, though she lived on. " Starting five years before him in the
race, she persevered for thirty more. But it was all an epilogue." That phrase, like so many of Mr. Guedalla's, is charmingly turned.
Disraeli's relation to his wife, like his relation to life, to - politics, and to literature, will always present a fascinating problem. " His long memory was capable of inexhaustible gratitude," we read, in a short chapter about the ever-devoted " Mary Anne," whose indulgent love and thin sparkling form of gaiety is perhaps the most attractive attribute of middle age. Everything that she did and said was in character, down to the last little note telling her husband not to live alone—a perfect instance of detached devotion.
What would Dizzie have been like had he married someone else ? One of the ladies of this book, for instance, Lady.
Tennyson, would have been unthinkable as a wife for him.
Lady Palmerston would have been less impossible. We put together these two names because their stories follow on in the book before us. Emily Tennyson, as Mr. Guedalla depicts her, is a shadowy, invalidish figure, near the golden gate of a conventional Heaven, but surely the portrait is not a good likeness ? The weight of Tennyson's grim egoism would soon have broken a plaster saint. On the contrary, Emily supported his spirit, strengthening both his genius and his faults to the end. She is a person who, to use the familiar phrase of the photographer, does not " take well." The other Emily stands at the antipodes. " One saw her at her best, I fancy, at Cambridge House on party nights."
In this false light Mr. Guedalla has managed to get a very clear picture of Emily Palmerston. Perhaps no one is themselves at a party (certainly not at a great Victorian political gathering), but it is very amusing and refreshing to see people from the outside—just for ten minutes—as their
contemporaries saw them, who looked at their features and read into them the gossip they happened to have heard. Mr. Guedalla creates this sort of illusion very skilfully.
Was there truth in Grenville's ill-natured hints? Did that lady, " with her head held high, always very smart and
sparkling and looking very well in her diamonds," really make all the cottagers on her estate adore her when she was Lady Comer ? And did she really arrange to arrive at church half -an hour late out of a pride too ridiculous to be profane ? One wonders.
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