Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley
Mn. Bunn brings to his attractive theme immense zest, an at times rather embarrassingly vivacious style, a romantic devotion to Venetia Digby, a sufficiently humorous apprecia- tion of Sir Kenelm, and (his best contribution) some successful delving among records and MSS, which has enabled him to reproduce here some hitherto unprint0 material, chiefly a group of four draft .letters by Digby, of which the recipients (if any) are unknown. Two are love letters to a woman, two letters about love to a man friend. Mr. Bligh thinks the addressee of the former and the theme of the latter to have been Venetia Stanley. But they are un- dated, and probably after Venetia's period, and anyhow it is rash to speculate concerning a gentleman of so large and warm a heart and of such an addiction to com-
posing Silo letters. They may even have been written merely for his letter-book, in which he preserved copies of his fine and sounding epistles, there to be read over by himself and others worthy of the privilege. However that may be, they are capital letters, as all Digby's are, did no doubt he thought so.
This book—beautifully printed and illustrated, by the way —is not, its author explains, a full-length biography. Rather it is an enthusiastic flinging before us of a quantity of not as yet quite co-ordinated material, old and new, pieced together with comment, eulogy, narrative, speculation, and occasional rather tart criticism of other writers on the subject. It was worth compiling. It contains a selection of letters, a good account of the Scanderoon privateering expedition, a sympathetic outline of this fine bombastic knight's career, and (in an appendix) some fragments of his unprinted literary critic- ism and a collection of those passages from the Private Memoirs
which its editor of 1827 thought. not modest enough to be included. in the public edition, but printed priVately in an appendix in 1828. In 1932 they certainly read mildly enough.
Mr. Bligh is in love with that remarkable essay in romantic tushery, the Memoirs, and is very angry with critics who have been less so. Well, this high-falutin, novelettish style is, of course, a taste, like another. Personally, I can read all Digby's other writings with greater pleasure, from the Conference with
a Lady about the Choke of a Religion to the receipts for making the powder of sympathy and cherry wine. Mr. Bligh, in his eager championship of his hero's literary style, says some rather puzzling things about the 'state of English prose in 1828 ; he sees it as " struggling for life," and implies• that scarcely any " every-day prose " existed, and that Digby's. only alternative to the conventionally romantic style he adopted for the Memoirs would have been the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible ! But English prose had been in a growingly vigorous condition for some two centuries ; the weapon slowly forged between Saxon and Norman, tempered to fineness under the Henrys, and used by the Elfzabethans for their splendid rapier-play, was ready to his hand. In his own time the Jacobeans and Carolines had been, and were, wielding it continuously in essays, comedies (for crisp " every- day " dialogue Digby might have gone to Middleton, had he wanted any such thing, but he did not) fiction, memoirs, journals, discourses, histories, and every other kind of prose venture. Burton had a few years before published his Anatomy ; nearly-everyone who could spell, and many who could not, were hurrying to the printers with their composi- tions. It was from no lack of good models that Sir Kenelm adopted the romanticized manner of the Memoirs ; it suited his theme and his temperament, and was one of the fashions of the day and of the day before, and does well enough. But it is not through the Memoirs that " the Mirandula of his age " lives for us to-day.
Mr. Bligh says that Digby lives " chiefly because he was a woman's lover." If that were a passport to life, there would be fewer dead. True, his Venetia was so beautiful as to be hymned in. the verses of a great number of the poets of the day ; which is why she lives ; for, beyond that she was beautiful and desirable, and had (anyhow while still a spinster) many lovers, we know little of Venetia. For all the proof we have to the contrary, she may have been a dull creature,_ though her lovers, enspelled by her loveliness, naturally thought otherwise, and gave her gifts of mind as well as body. But Stelliana, who represents her in Digby's Memoirs, cuts but a _dull, conventionally romantic figure. Beauty perishes, beauty passes, and leaves no wrack behind to drift on oblivion's seas, as do intellect, character and wit. A Dorothy Osborne laughs to us down the centuries with gay anecdote, witty comment, and crisp tenderness ; a Mrs. Hutchinson regards us gravely, a charming, learned, puri- tanical prig ; a Queen Elizabeth swears us down, a living, dominating termagant. But a Venetia Digby, a Mary Queen of Scots, stare at us emptily ; dumb, beautiful beings, null, dull and shadowy, wraiths but scarcely revenants. They had beauty ; they loved and were loved ; they inspired poets ; they lived, died, and are buried ; and that is all about them. Sir Kenelm Digby, on the other hand, is as blatantly alive a revenant as one could wish to meet. Few men have, in their day, been given more epithets than this errant mountebank, this magazine of all the arts, Mirandula of his age, useless, rest- less being of scanty wisdom, the very Pliny of his age for lying. His love and marriage are the least part of this great voluble Gasconesque creature, this. bustling, restless, eager, in- quisitiVe man, who in his spare moments would plan and achieve a privateering expedition on a giant scale, who dabbled in alchemy, chemistry, astrology, spiritualisin, theology and cooking, acted as Catholic agent, undertook diplomatic missions for King and Protector (whichever was in power), huffed and hectored with the Pope, his spiritual sovereign, to his face, conducted ladies into nunneries (" though," as someone remarked, " he has not the manners to become a, friar himself "), fought duels for his king and boasted of it, sought the elixir of life, joined the Royal Society at its forindation, and blew a faafare on his. own trumpet round Europe and back again. NOWonder that Mr. Bligh and a}ery-One else (except a few of his Contemporaries; such as
. . the Jesuits) have always admired this splendid, amusing figure of a man.
Mr. Bligh stirs. up our memories of him and adds a little to our knowledge. He is over-annoyed with some of his fellow-writers, some of whom have called John Aubrey a gossip and scandal-monger (but wasn't he ?) while others seem to have suggested that Venetia may have been chaste, which certainly seems improbable, but need not worry us. He is driven by these annoyances to drag in, rather irrelevantly, a number of extracts from Aubrey's Lives, to illustrate his charm, which surely needs no bush to-day, and to make some of the usual and inexact comments on that much-bullied section of our forbears who flourished between 1837 and 1991. If he should later write a full-length biography, he will perhaps lop these excrescences, and stick closer to his theme. It is a theme worth expansion and research.
ROSE. MACAULAY.
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