Edited by Sophie Geoffroy

No.3: Winter 2007/8

Irene Cooper Willis : Preface to Vernon Lee’s Letters, privately printed, 1937, pp. i-xiv,
with the original page references within the text between brackets



Vernon Lee, who died in February, 1935, left instructions with me, as her executor, that no biography of her should be published. After her death, however, a mass of letters were found, tied up in packets according to years and labelled, in her handwriting: “My Letters Home. Not to be read except privately until 1980.” Evidently, then, she had contemplated the publication of these in the distant future. But 1980 is a long time ahead, and as these letters are not likely to interest posterity half as much as they will interest those who knew Vernon Lee personally, I decided to have a small number of copies of them printed privately, and the response to a circular which was sent out to friends of Vernon Lee has enabled this to be done. Special thanks are due to Miss Nona Stewart who did all the typing from the original letters, which were by no means easy to decipher and, as this book shows, voluminous.

The main letters cover the years 1881-94. Most of them were written to Mrs Paget, the mother of Vernon Lee, but a few are to her half-brother, the poet, Eugene Lee-Hamilton. He, a prostrate invalid for many years, lived with his mother and step-mother, in Florence when the 1881 letters begin, but, after 1889, at a villa on the Fiesole hillside, outside the city. Nominally, Vernon Lee lived with her family, but she did not spend much time with them. Every year she went to England for some months and also travelled about in Italy and elsewhere. She wrote home constantly; her letters are almost a diary of her doings. She went to London, at first, in order to make literary connections and she reports in detail. She wrote to inform and to entertain her mother and brother, and also, it is clear, to keep hold of the reins of home affairs. The wish to entertain, as well as the hurry and tiredness in which she often wrote, partly account, perhaps, for the ruthlessness of some of her judgements of people.

The earliest letters of all, written in the 70’s, are very interesting as regards her literary development and show that in 1870, when Violet Paget was thirteen and a half years old, she had already started upon her career as a writer. Her first publication, Biographie d’une Monnaie, was published in a Swiss paper and signed “Mlle. V. P.” The young authors’ annoyance with the editorial cutting of the original MS is revealed in the letter which she wrote from Paris to her father. The sketch is a remarkable production for anyone so young as she was, but not more remarkable than the letters. There are, among her papers, four or five childish letters written by her, aged nine, at Baden, to Bruder, as she called Eugene. These are no more “forward” than the letters of any little girl of that age: the [ii] handwriting, spelling and expression in them are all equally childish. But in four years she had made great strides: she was very much “Mlle. V. P.” Her handwriting is formed and fluent; her spelling, except for a slip now and again, is correct; her manner of expression is grown up. Of course, it is the grown-upness of a precocious girl, taking her cue from her elders and much influenced by Eugene. He presided over Violet’s education, jointly, it seems, with Mrs Paget, whose guidance of her daughter’s writing ambitions was so charmingly described by Vernon Lee in a fragment of autobiography tucked into her Handling of Words. Eugene’s letters were full of priggish admonitions, and a bundle of letters written in French during the early seventies addressed to “mon bien bon Eugène” from Violet are almost literary exercises. These are not printed but I have included here some letters from Violet to Mrs Jenkin. Mrs Jenkin was the mother of Fleeming Jenkin of R. L. Stevenson’s Memoir, and herself the writer of fiction which for a time had quite a vogue. She came of West Indian parentage and was born in Jamaica in 1807; it was probably in this way that the Pagets knew her. Mrs Paget herself being connected with that part of the world. Her history was romantic and somewhat mysterious, according to a brochure La Donna nella Vita di Giovanni Ruffini by Itala Cremona Cozzolino (1932) found among Vernon Lee’s papers. In that brochure it is stated that Mrs Jenkin, when aged about thirty, and already married to Captain Jenkin, had a love affair with Agostino Ruffini, during his stay in Edinburgh, which came to a sudden unhappy end. Mrs Jenkin then fell into a decline, from which she was rescued by Agostino’s brother Giovanni and his celebrated elderly friend, Mrs Cornelia Turner, née Chastel de Boinville, both of whom the Pagets knew well. Mrs Jenkin appears to have fallen in love with Giovanni: exactly what their relationship was is not known, but whatever it was, Mrs Turner’s position with Giobanni remained unshaken and she mothered Mrs Jenkin as if she were her own child. Mrs Jenkin did much to help in the publication of Ruffini’s novels in England, and is believed to have been the original of “Lucy” in Doctor Antonio which made such a stir in literary circles in 1885. Later, she took to writing novels herself, and apparently settled down into at least an outward show of domesticity with Captain Jenkin who, during the Ruffini episodes, was presumably on the high seas. Her health began to fail in 1875 and she died in 1885, three days after the death of her husband, the pathos of which fact Violet Paget’s remarks upon the captain enable us to realise. She was evidently Violet’s first literary adviser, and judging from a correspondence between the two from 1870 onwards, a selection of which is here given, of immense assistance to the young author whose elaborately grateful letters for favours received generally and an Oliver Twist request in them for more. Mrs Jenkin’s advisership can have been no sinecure. The [iii] self-confidence, the “attack,” to use a word she often used in speaking of herself, was extraordinary. But what is also extraordinary is the girl’s absorption from the age of fourteen in the subject of Italian eighteenth century music. When Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy was published in 1880, the youth of the author astonished literary circles. It was an amazing book for a girl of twenty-four to have written. Few, if any English readers were in a position to criticise the learning displayed in it, for it was a pioneer work, a piece of literary archaeology, the study of a period, not distant in time, but forgotten, if ever recognised, as the mise en scène that is was of a remarkable efflorescence of national art. Italian music, Italian drama of the eighteenth century –the world of fine ladies, cavalieri serventi, pedants, Arcadian rhymesters and poetasters in which the composers and singers, playwrights and actors, Metastasio, the plays of Goldoni and Gozzi, the music of Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Jommelli and Marcello arose –were reunited in this book in a romantically transfigured way. Vernon Lee had discovered that vanished world accidentally, she always insisted, wandering about the deserted gardens of the Villa Doria Pamfili in Rome, one hot spring. In the Preface to the 1907 edition of the Studies of the eighteenth century in Italy (the only edition now available), she wrote that the period “became, so to speak, the hay-loft, the tool-house, the remote lumber-room full of discarded mysteries and of lurking ghosts where a half-grown prig might satisfy, in unsuspicious gravity, mere child-like instincts of make-believe and romance.” “Save for a few funny little pedants, gnawing a bit of memoir or making those singular little heaps of historical detritus (special to Italy) called pubblicazioni per nozze, no one ever seemed to enter my lumber-room of an Italian eighteenth century; and I was left to transform it into a place of wonders, an Aladdin’s or Montechristo’s cave; every rickety table or chair [became] a throne or a fervid scaffold; every yellow roll of paper a Nostradamus’s Manual of Necromancy; every rag or tinsel, hanging from a nail, a robe embroidered with pearl and sequin—nay, a garment, like Peau D’Ane’s, woven of sun-and-moonbeams. These essays are the log-book of my explorations through that wonderful world of moth-eaten and dust-engrained, but sometimes beautiful and pathetic in themselves, and always transfigured by my youthful fancy; they are the inventory of my enchanted garret.”

Well, if the Italian eighteenth century came in this way to be a playground for the young writer, there is evidently something to be said for an upbringing on the line pompously outlined by Eugene in a letter about “dear Baby’s intellectual development.” “She at present unites a liberal, philosophical home with a residence among the triumphs of imagination, of art, of beauty… It is well to pause and examine one’s position. Dear Baby is at present in the possession of extraordinary opportunities. [iv] Five years hence her hours will necessarily be spent in society, and in preparing for society. At Rome she should be working at Italian by which I mean not only the language but the literature. She should be talking the language daily with one or more persons of cultivated taste. The great advantage of lessons is that they introduce regularity and method into one’s work. I will not for a moment imagine that Baby would pass her time unprofitably. But how apt is one not to acquire mere smatterings, when one’s intellectual powers are exclusively engaged on accidental reading.” This was written in December, 1870, when Violet was 14 and her brother was 25. He need not have been anxious. “Dear baby” was already finding her way into her enchanted garret. The second letter to Mrs Jenkin (p. 21) describes her first visit to the Villa Doria Pamfili, and a few months later, actually on the 26th of June, 1871, took place that memorable visit to the Bosco Parrasio on the Janiculum where (in 1690) Crescimbeni inaugurated the famous Accademia degli Arcadi. The next letter to Mrs Jenkin (p. 22) was written soon after that visit, and contains the account which Vernon Lee later enlarged into her first chapter on the Arcadian Academy in her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. In the preface to the second edition, before referred to, she says: “My 18th century lore was acquired at an age (more precisely between 15 and 20) when some of us are still the creatures of an unconscious play instinct.”

This letter, however, shows, more precisely still, that Violet began her eighteenth century studies even earlier than the age of 15; she was exactly 14-and-a-half when she first walked in the gardens of the Villa Doria and longed to conjure up the shades of its former society. She was then evidently already deep in study of the period, knowing, as she says in the letter, more about the history of the Arcadians than the dilapidated Custodian knew. She had picked up, from old bookshops and stalls, other books than the Voyage d’Italie by De la Lande which she speaks of; her copies of Burney’s Metastasio and The History of Music are dated Paris, 1870. In July, 1871, when she was still fourteen, she was planning a series of papers on Metastasio which became her first book, though it was not published in book form until nine years later. “I have of late been very active collecting materials…” she writes. “We” (that is her mother and herself) “have ransacked all the libraries, bookstalls and print-shops in Rome and I have even asked my brother and a friend in London to send me the books on the subject which I cannot find here.” No doubt, in various quarters, various people were being enlisted in “Mlle. V. P.’s” services! Vernon Lee was as precocious in the art of making her friends useful to her literary projects as she was in intellectual development, which is saying a great deal. Her brilliancy, not to mention her ceremonial, quite eighteenth century [v] manners of expressing gratitude, made people very willing to serve her. The good-natured Abbate Ciccolini, of the derelict Academy, fortunately unaware of the strictures that were being made upon his appearance and stupidity, was only one of the first of those whom the astonishingly clever, ambitious girl charmed into ready bondage and use. To the “extraordinary opportunities” pointed out by Eugene as being in his half-sister’s possession –“a liberal, philosophical home with a residence among the triumphs of imagination, of art, of beauty”—might have been added an extraordinary combination of inherited aptitudes, “attack” from her maternal, slave-owning grandfather, Edward Hamlin Adams, and equally marked amiable address inherited from French ancestors through her father. The combination was irresistible.

I do not think I shall be offending against Vernon Lee’s prohibition of a biography in giving some details of the Paget family.

Mrs Paget, before her marriage to Henry Ferguson Paget, the father of Vernon Lee (whose real name was Violet Paget), was the widow of a Mr. Lee-Hamilton, by whom she had a son, Eugene. Her maiden name was Matilda Adams. She was the daughter of Edward Hamlin Adams, of Middleton Hall, Carmathenshire, an early Victorian magnate whose forebears had been West Indian planters and who, after making a fortune in Jamaica, had bought a big place in Wales. He was Member for Carmathenshire in the “Reform” Parliament and died in 1842. After his death, his sons took the name of Abadam and his large estate was for some years the subject of a family quarrel and a Chancery action, in consequence of which Mrs Paget, in Vernon Lee’s childhood, was often short of money. The Paget family, in early years, were always moving about between different places in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Later, in the seventies, owing to Eugene’s long, strange illness, they settled in Florence where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Vernon Lee told me of her maternal grandfather: —“He was extremely doctrinaire and moral, an ardent Voltairian, who spent much of his time disputing with the local parsons and refusing to pay tithes. His early letters to my grandmother, when he was a young man in Barbadoes and she a newly-married wife in Philadelphia, show that his business eye was as keen as his moral sententiousness was terrific. There were diningroom chairs at Middleton carved with his monogram and the legend ‘Aspire, Persevere, and Indulge not.” The last item of this injunction was not heeded, however, by his sons, whose indulgences, in litigation, among other things, are among my earliest memories.”

Of her mother (Matilda Adams, born 1815), Vernon Lee said: —“She was quite cynical, disillusioned and emancipated, but she believed in behaving conventionally on the surface if you wanted to go into society which, however, she didn’t. She left England, [vi] to escape the English Sunday, and went to live in France. Her two husbands bored her and she gave them their liberty after having had a child by each.” The first child was James Eugene Lee-Hamilton, born in 1845: the second was Violet (“Vernon Lee”), born on October 14th, 1856, at Château St. Leonard, about 14 miles from Boulogne.

There was some mystery about Mr. Paget’s ancestry. Such facts as I have discovered point to his father having been a French refugee nobleman of the name of De Fragnier who married a Miss Paget and lived for a time at Southend, then a fashionable place. While there, one day —I quote from faded jottings, labelled “Henry’s Father,” in Mrs. Paget’s wild handwriting—“a carriage drove up bearing a French ducal crown and a lady within the carriage who desired her servants (who wore the French royal livery) to ask for M. de Fragnier. He rushed like a madman to the carriage, spoke for only one instant to the lady, and rushed back into the house, giving orders that all should be instantly prepared for his departure. In London, with all due forms, he naturalised himself an Englishman and adopted the name of Ferguson. After two years he returned to Southend to fetch away his wife and family, whom he settled at Warsaw, himself repairing to Petersburg where he had an interview with the Emperor Alexander who granted him permission to open a University College to be entitled the Nobles’ University (to be exclusively for the nobility). He, Henry’s Father, was to be sole Master, determining the studies, choosing the Professors, fixing the salaries; in short every large detail, but having nothing to do with the teaching. This College for the Nobility subsisted 14 years. “Remember this,” he would say to Henry in his passionate way. “Remember this, that you are as good and better than any of them” (of the young nobility then in Varsovie).”

Henry Ferguson Paget, as he called himself, the son of this M. de Fragnier, was apparently educated in this college and took part or became involved in the Polish risings of the forties. After many soldiering adventures he escaped to England and earned a living by teaching. It was as a tutor for Eugene that Mrs Lee-Hamilton, then a widow, first met her second husband. They were married at Dresden, in the house of the British Minister there, on October 15th, 1855, and in the marriage certificate the husband is named and described as Henry Hippolyte Ferguson Paget, son of Henry Ferguson formerly of Warsaw. A year later, when Violet was born, the Pagets were in France but soon afterwards they returned to Germany. Mr Paget, apparently, gave up his work, though he may have continued to teach Eugene, who was eleven at Violet’s birth. His main interest in life seems to have been sport, and it was partly in pursuit of opportunities for Henry’s fishing and shooting that the Pagets shifted their quarters so often. Among Vernon Lee’s papers are a collection of odd little letters from [vii] Mrs. Paget to Eugene, at Oriel College, Oxford and at Nice in 1865-6. Mrs Paget seems to have written, or rather scrawled, with the worst of pens on any scrap of paper that came to hand; on one occasion she used a bit of linen. In these letters she is agitated about the next move, being at the moment in Baden where evidently Henry was finding little sport and no company. “Oh for God’s sake,” she writes, “let us know whether there is fishing or not at Nice, and free or preserved, and where precisely. Henry is dreadfully out of spirits and it is doubtful whether Mr. – will send him a ticket to fish in the morning. The fact is very foolishly he has made enemies of all here by talking eternally against the gambling.”

But Mrs. Paget’s chief concern was her son’s health. She adored Eugene and always expressed herself violently. “My Darling,” “Life of my Soul,” she called him, writing to him daily, and becoming agonised if he did not write daily to her. Mother and son invariably addressed one another in the second person singular. “At the thought of thy being ill I myself am in ague. Hast thou quinine pills with thee? If not, pray immediately desire a druggist to make thee a scruple in 20 pills” – “Pray be on thy guard against the transitions of temperature” – “I hope thou’st feeding thyself wisely. Hast thou a good soup for luncheon daily? What dost thou take for supper? For God’s sake, let thy bones, muscles, brains and spirit have all the help that Beef (and Sleep sufficient) can afford” – “How I miss thee! How I love thee! How vexed I am that I so stupidly forgot to give thee the warm mantle. In comparison with thy health everything else seems a trifle” – “Very glad thou get’st a better dinner in thy room, and by the by that is a good thing thou can’st enjoy thy dinner” – the letters are largely composed of such quaintly worded anxieties, garnished with scraps of news and impulsive wails about Henry. “It happens unluckily that Henry is very unpleasant to-day. With all his virtues he certainly is a dreadful bore and torment very often” – “What I entreat thee also particularly to attend to is the little commission for poor Henry—his hackles and silks—for he is dreadfully down, and no wonder! He has a troublesome cough and it is dull for him. Oh!! The shooting costs too much. Besides the people he meets are not much to his taste.” To another note, Mrs. Paget scrawls a postscript, heavily underlined: “For God’s sake, do not forget Henry’s hackles.”

On leaving Oriel, Eugene entered the Foreign Office and later became attached to Lord Lyons’ staff at the British Embassy in Paris. He was there during the Franco-Prussian war and when Paris was surrounded by the enemy he moved with the Embassy, first to Tours and then to Bordeaux. In 1873, he suddenly collapsed with paralytic symptoms which grew worse: from then, [viii] for nearly twenty years, he was a prostrate invalid. His illness, which went through many phases —there were times when he could bear neither light nor sound, and times when he insisted on being spoken to in sentences containing no more than three words—was generally supposed to have arisen from overwork, but a correspondence between him and his mother covering the years 1870-3 does not support this view. It shows that Eugene took great care not to over-work in the diplomatic service, and that his chief troubles were excessive boredom with his job and his colleagues at the Embassy, incessant longing to be with his mother and a vague ambition to write some great historical work.

From copies of the diagnoses of French doctors and psychologists which were found among Vernon Lee’s papers, it appears that Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s case was considered, at the time, to be one in which auto-suggestion played a part, and his recovery from 1894 onwards was undoubtedly due to skilful psychological handling by a German specialist who told him that a man of uncommon will-power, like himself, could, if he wished, rise from his bed and walk. He wished: he rose, with several relapses, and eventually returned to normal life, visited America, married and had a child. The child’s death, in infancy, brought about a partial return to the mental apathy that had been characteristic, at first, of his former collapse. He died, in 1907, from kidney disease. During his invalid existence, after the first stages of his illness had passed, he composed and published several slim volumes of poetry which were well noticed and brought him a good deal of romantic attention.

Vernon Lee, in her youth, was a most attentive sister. Much of her leisure was devoted to providing intellectual entertainment for Eugene. She was the magnet which drew so many visitors to 5, Via Garibaldi in Florence where the Pagets lived before settling at Il Palmerino, outside the city, and upon her fell also the functions of a sieve. Eugene was as easily bored as ever, and only the pick of the visitors could be allowed to filter from the Sala into the room where he lay on a bier-like couch. He was very proud of his sister’s reputation, “touchingly proud,” it was often observed. It is, of course, mere speculation on my part, but I cannot help wondering whether that observation man not have held a clue to Eugene’s trouble. His own ambitions were literary and not in the diplomatic world, as the letters above mentioned show. His linguistic abilities—having been educated on the continent, he spoke French and German very well—perhaps misled him into choosing a diplomatic career which, after he had entered upon it, ceased to attract. He then dreamed of writing a great work, but he lacked emotional interest in any particular subject and began, moreover, to feel overshadowed by the amazing brilliancy and determination of his young half-sister who, at fourteen, had already begun to plan her Studies of the Eighteenth Century [ix] in Italy. Illness was a refuge, securing him his adoring but critical mother’s devotion, and general sympathy, and protecting him from any unfavourable verdict upon his abilities or comparison of them with his sister’s. It might even —so may have run the argument of his subconscious mind— provide him with a sphere and an inspiration whereby he could achieve unrivalled success. There are passages in his poems in which he laments his fate poetically, and yet evidently feels that in resigning himself to misfortune he is reaching angelic heights. All this is surmise, but in such a case surmise is all that is possible. Eugene’s recovery noticeably marched with Mrs Paget’s failing health and increasing inability to wait upon him hand and foot. Family feeling for many years prevented Vernon Lee from treating him as a bore, but there is a tone of suppressed exasperation in many of her letters to him when she was away from home. Restored to health and independence, discerning people found him much less interesting than he had been as an invalid, and Vernon Lee made it clear to him, after their mother’s death in 1896, that she did not wish him to go on living with her.

Now and again, in letters to her mother, Vernon Lee adds a postscript: “How is Papa? You never mention him.” Mr. Paget led a life apart from his family. It used to be said that he always had his meals at the railway station. He took long walks, believed to be for digestive reasons, gardened, was interested in mechanical contrivances, and did sepia landscape sketches. The late Miss Isabella Ford, of Adel, told me that when she first stayed at Il Palmerino, she was there for some time before she found out that the elderly man whom she had seen in the garden was Mr. Paget. He was a spare, bearded man with black hair (and magpie streaks in it) falling smoothly back from a high brow, and thin features. He was very agreeable in company and had a fund of stories about his adventures. Though absent so much from home during the day, he never failed to take his wife for a walk after dinner in the evening, with a lantern. He did not get on with his stepson.

Mrs. Paget, while she lived, dominated the family. She was a tiny, fiery person, with purely intellectual tastes and a heart that overflowed with pity (and rage) at the thought of any oppression to races or animals. She would shake her fist in the street at men who ill-used horses. Once she saw a dejected-looking monkey at some farm which she passed on her drives, and promptly set about having a suit made for it which she presented to the farmer’s wife. On her next visit to the farm, she found the monkey still unclad and the farmer’s child running about in the suit which she had presented. The friend who told me this story was an eye-witness of the scene, and added that she could never forget the fury of Mrs. Paget who stood up in the carriage, exclaiming: “Ingratitudine! Ingratitudine!” From her letters, Mrs. Paget seems often to have been made frantic by every-day [x] practical matters, and Vernon Lee was like her in this. Mr. Paget had some dexterity: he worked a sewing machine. But Vernon Lee, her mother and her half-brother were, all three, small people, of poor physique and with a kind of fundamental helplessness which the violence of their natures tended to precipitate into impatience and rage. Family feeling between them was strong but, at the same time, they seem all to have been rather afraid of one another, or perhaps afraid of not getting their own ways. In their letters to one another they were either ingratiating or dictatorial, being extremely polite or else being very rude.

Mrs. Paget, it was said, had great charm. Vernon Lee had charm also. She could behave quite exquisitely, and she was able to charm to the very end. But being, as it were, a natural force, there was, of course, a violently egotistical side to her. She lived in perpetual anxiety about her health. Her personal life was not a happy one, and it became very lonely, partly owing to great deafness during the last ten years, but more, I venture to think, because she had never allowed herself to care deeply for anyone in a simple, straightforward way. She described herself perfectly once, when she said to me: “I am hard. I am cold. I like people as I like things, that is to say my likings are preferences for the qualities which I can enjoy. Liking people does not for me mean devotion: it means only my answer, as it were, to qualities in them which please or charm me. Loving them in the way you speak of, the way of being willing to do anything for them, is intolerable to me. I cannot like, or love, at the expense of having my skin rubbed off. I can do without people. I find it more comfortable to do without them. My relationship with X” (a friend for whom I was pleading) “has come to be an avoidance, on my part, of that part of her which bores me, and a relief when I see from her face or manner that there is for the moment nothing to avoid, that she is not going to bore me by pouring out her troubles. I have not got —–I am perfectly aware of it—a sympathy for people which goes out from me to them, independent of my own state of being bored or not. Other people’s troubles and their re-iteration of them bore me. When Miss Z., for instance, tells me that she is miserable, it bores me. The more miserable she says she is, the more I am bored. She says she is miserable about the war. Well I can stand the war, but Miss Z. on the war, I cannot stand!”

We may enjoy this frank statement, as I did, particularly the last sentence of it. Actual troubles, even calamities, are often easier to bear than people’s ways of bearing them. Sympathy, when others are miserable, beyond a wish not to seem unsympathetic and so to conceal boredom when they outpour, is a very rare thing, how rare, our enjoyment of the last sentence shows. Vernon Lee (who even on her friends’ shortcomings was never boring) constantly said things which hit the nail on the head in [xi] this way and led one to realise that her egoism was only removed from one’s own by its unblushingness and its consistency. There are lapses in the ordinary person’s egoism, times when sympathy does go out from oneself to others, independent of one’s own state of being bored or not, or seems to; but who knows? It may be that these lapses are not independent of boredom, but it is a boredom with one’s own affairs and interests, a being at a loose end of some kind, which does not occur in a life of intense direction and aim. The man at the wheel is not tempted to make casual landings as he steers his ship on a voyage: his attention is fixed on the track that leads to his journey’s end. Sympathy means casual landings on other people’s lives. From those landings, Vernon Lee determinedly set her mind and made no secret of it.

But such determination does not appeal, in general; and even those who value the life of the mind, like or hope to find that a man or woman of genius was sometimes, as the saying is, human before everything else. Affection for the genius, not only admiration or envy, lies behind that hope. There is —it may be stupid— but there is a strong feeling that human pleasures, the pleasures of loving and sharing and sorrowing with our fellow-creatures, even though at times they bore us and we them unspeakably, are more worth having than intellectual pleasures, and that to do without them is tragic. Vernon Lee did without them and did without them contemptuously —that is what would make the true story of her life sad reading, and why I am glad that in her testamentary instructions she prohibited a biography.

It was, however, her wish, expressed to me many times during her life, that, if possible, a selection of her unpublished writings should be published after her death. These, however, have proved to be unpublishable, the greater part of them consisting of bulky notes on the subject of “Art and Emotion,” which no one except students of psychological aesthetics would be interested to read, and pacifist writings of the same kind as those in her book Satan, the Waster, published in 1920 and republished in 1930. The latter do not add anything to what Vernon Lee had already written in that excellent, but little-read book, and they were discarded by her, when putting that book together, for reasons of space. There remained only a few sketches and notes of the Genius Loci description which have not much more than pathetic interest, being so obviously written against tiredness and invading melancholy. Setting aside the difficulty of finding a publisher for them, she would not have been pleased, to say the least of it, that a book commemorative of her should have been confined to these. In a way, she resented being appreciated as a writer of such sketches. It was this sort of reputation, she said, that had queered her pitch as a serious writer; it had pigeon-holed her as a mere essayist on minor themes. Her ambition was to be widely recognised as a thinker on big ones. That she was not so recognised, that Vital [xiii] Lies (1912) and Satan, the Waster (1920) received so little notice, caused her intense disappointment. She also attributed what she used to speak of as “my failure, as a writer,” to her isolated social position, often describing herself as an alien, having no ties, of nation, blood, class or profession. She was just an individual, she said, and to be an individual was a weak thing, depriving her of influence. Her diagnosis was partly, perhaps, correct. As a writer on art, she had no professional connections, such as Ruskin or Pater had, to bring her a regular following. But, on the other hand, her writings on art were not of the academic kind; they were particularly individual essays, imaginative responses to art and artists, places and periods. Except for her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, which had its due, when published, as a classical work on a musical period, and some Renaissance essays, she wrote nothing that fell into an academic category. She was not a specialist in any branch of art, history or literature. The value and charm of the Genius Loci type of essay that she wrote depended, in a way, on its rarity. She contributed these essays, at one time, regularly to the Westminster Gazette —they were developed from note-book impressions— but let alone no writer, however sensitive, being able to produce that sort of thing incessantly, incessance would have had the effect upon its value that inflation has upon currency. The best of them were republished in book from, and it is due to them that her name, in the literary world, stands for what it does, a subtle and highly cultured impressionability, collaborating with a store of learning and delicate associations and endowed with a fine eloquence. That she did not add to the wide reputation which she won in the eighties and nineties with her first books, was due —I think most people who knew her would agree— to a switching of her interest to a direction where the majority of general readers could not, or were not disposed to follow her. She became absorbed in psychological aesthetics. She outlined this interest and the problems it awoke in her mind in her preface to Art and Man, a collection of notes and essays written by her friend Miss Anstruther-Thomson, and published after the death of that friend in 1921. Only those who knew something of that friendship, and who could read between the lines of that touching preface could estimate Miss Anstruther-Thomson’s contribution to Vernon Lee’s theories at their proper worth and discover that the cause of the breakdown of their so-called “joint-work” arose from Vernon Lee’s insatiable and, to her fellow-worker, exhausting pursuit of it. Where Miss Anstruther-Thomson tired, it was not likely that the generality of Vernon Lee’s former readers would be interested. Such a book as Beauty and Ugliness (1912) was doomed to failure. It bored the general reading public, and the method of its approach to the questions it dealt with was too amateurish (using that word in no derogatory sense) to make it acceptable to the academic world. The same [xiii] criticism applies to Vernon Lee’s last book —Music and its Lovers— over the preparation for which the author spent years. The book received respectful and admiring notice, but few people, outside musical critics, can have read it in full. It was too long and, as often happened in the later writings of Vernon Lee, the subject had been over-worked and used as a peg for eloquence. She had always been long-winded, but, as she grew older, the increasingly lonely circumstances of her life resulted in whatever she was writing becoming the outlet of the entire process of her intellectual digestion. She wrote as she thought, or rather as she talked, slowly but unhesitatingly, with any amount of modification and expansion of her statements as she went along, and constant parentheses. She struck off into illustrative ideas and fancies, and brought all these by-way excursions into the body of her sentences. She was a brilliant talker, and peculiarly witty. But her mind was too immediately fertile, and her practical experience too narrow, for her theories to be always sound. She was apt to “fly blind,” to use air language. She was a magnificent improviser, an impressionist who straightaway spun her impressions into elaborate theories and then embroidered them. When she talked she needed an exceptional amount of elbow-room and unlimited attention from her listener —approach to argument with her could only have been secured by the introduction of traffic signals, and these she might have ignored— but as a talker she was always interesting and often arresting. Her unique personality, those intensely inquisitive (though not penetrating) eyes, almond-shaped and set slightly aslant in the small but long Hapsburg type of face, her slow, foreign articulation of the syllables of words and the peculiar range of her voice, compelled attention. There was not this compulsion upon the reader of her written talk.

She should have lived in Olympian circles, discoursing. She would have made a perfect Sibyl. It was worth a journey to hear her pronounce: —“From my friends’ matrimonial adventures I avert my eyes and say: ‘There goes something primaeval!’” One of the friends, whose troubles produced the superb self-drawn portrait of Vernon Lee which I have quoted, will, I am sure, enjoy the flavour of the Sibyl’s comment, after making it: “I respect Miss Z.: I occasionally like her.”

What Vernon Lee lost by avoidance of simple human contacts she set herself to find in art and Nature. She found a great deal, and probably her responsiveness in these directions (as well as to qualities in persons which did not bore her) was intensified by her lack of responsiveness in other ways. She was acutely sensitive to landscape and to the spirit of places, and I think that her greatest gift to her friends lay in this delightful sensibility of hers and the writings which sprang from it. To go for a walk with Vernon Lee, to climb with her the quarry valleys, thick with myrtle scrub, near her Florentine home, to visit some village church or [xiv] old villa, was to be admitted into her rapt enjoyment and to feel how vital —as vital as the air— to her were the impressions she gathered, how completely, too, these impressions reflected her untiringly analytic, fastidious mind. There was not an atom of sham or affectation in her tastes; she was absolutely sincere in them, and spontaneous. She would have been a better writer had she curbed some of this spontaneity. But in soul she was an artist, forever selecting, rejecting, comparing and treasuring, and it was the artist in her that her friends loved, and which enabled them to bear (and even to enjoy) her less pleasant qualities.

She had a Chinese eye, and a Chinese power of drawing sustenance from what is beautiful. Her notebooks show how exceptional her observation was and how much such observation meant to her in refreshment. The places she visited were more to her than were her friends. They were founts of memories and associations, associations often with people who, in abstract form, were dearer to her than she had felt them to be when they were alive.

No tribute to her memory would be complete without reference to her political opinions. It was rare, in the pre-war period, to find a writer and an aesthete so in touch with European liberal opinion as she was, and so alive to the various national policies which led to the Great War. In that war she was an acknowledged pacifist, and in speech, writing and money supported propaganda for a just and reasonable peace. She was a generous subscriber to funds for the relief of victims of the war and of the miseries and injustices resulting from it. Her fine book Satan, the Waster, a veritable treasury of pacifist doctrine, was reviewed in The Nation by Mr. Bernard Shaw who wrote: —“Vernon Lee has the whole European situation in the hollow of her hand… knows history philosophically… is a political psychologist.” She was at home in England, France, Germany and Italy. She had lived, sometimes for years at a time, in all these countries, and her study of international politics began in the days of the Franco-Prussian war, at the outbreak of which she was a girl of fourteen, staying in Paris. Her pacifist attitude in 1914 sprang from no feeling of being “au-dessus de la mêlée”; she felt the war deeply, and was torn by it more than most people, because she had roots in Germany, as well as in England, Italy and France. Fortunately for her, she died at her Italian home before the outbreak of the Italo-Abyssinian war.

All our attempts at finding the present copyright holder of Irene Cooper Willis's preface have been made without success. If this comes to the attention of the copyright holder we would be very pleased to hear from her or him.


[1] Something to do with fishing-tackle. N. d. E.