The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 8

  False feelings lead to a false vision of the world. “Truth,” she said, “is what one believes at the moment.” What she believed was always something creditable to herself. Since it was essential for her to see herself in the sympathetic light appropriate to a heroine, she learnt to blind herself to all facts that went against her, and to invent such others as were needed to set her conduct in a favourable perspective. Her history, as it appears in the records left to us, is an ironical comedy of appearance and reality. Side by side run always two stories, what happened to Caroline and what she pretended had happened. Living wholly in a wish-fulfilment world of her own creation, she insisted it was the real one. Nor was she content simply to contemplate its perfections. In order to feel completely satisfied, she had to impose the false world on the real. Disgusted with life as she found it, she was yet confident it could be made what she wished, and spent all her energies seeking out occasions and creating situations in which her dreams could be realized. Of course they proved a disappointment, but undefeated she always tried again. Her career was a series of theatrical performances designed to exhibit the brilliance of her personality to herself and the world. The agility of her imagination made her repertory of parts a large one. Comedy and tragedy came equally easy to her: sometimes she appeared as an unconventional child of nature, sometimes as an experienced woman of the world, sometimes as a devoted wife and mother; she was also ready to take the boards as a queen of fashion, or an heroic idealist. And it must be owned that in all these parts she gave a brilliant performance. Here was where her touch of genius came in. However commonplace the character she was impersonating, it was transfigured into something unique by her wit, her eloquence, the flicker of her fascinating fancy. We of posterity, watching her from the comfortable distance of a hundred years, feel inclined to applaud such masterpieces of the histrionic art with unqualified admiration. But it was very different for the people who had to live with her. For they had to behave as if she were not acting; they were required to respect and sympathize with sentiments they knew were mostly imaginary. Moreover, Caroline made use of them to fill the supporting roles in her productions; to their bewilderment, unasked and unrehearsed, they found themselves being treated as heroes and villains in dramas, of whose very plots they were ignorant. Sometimes, exasperated by some particularly flagrant example of her insincerity, they told her the truth about herself. Then for a moment the mask did fall; appearances were forgotten in a spitfire explosion of wounded vanity. But it was not for long. Within a short time the old machinery of self-deception began to work: she would re-enter as some new character designed to meet her new situation; it might be a pathetic penitent or a generous nature quick to recognize its faults; complete in either case with such plausible misrepresentation of the facts as was needed to give verisimilitude to the part she had chosen.

  The extraordinary thing is that she should have been able to keep herself so blissfully blind to reality during nineteen years’ existence on this disillusioning planet. But circumstances had been favourable to her. Her upbringing for one thing; Lady Bessborough, for all that she was so affectionate, was a bad mother. Unable to say no, and distracted by the complications of her own private life, she did nothing to check the extravagance of her daughter’s temperament. Besides, her own reputation was so tarnished that it was thought better that Caroline should spend most of her childhood away from her; partly with her grandmother, Lady Spencer, and partly at Devonshire House. Neither did her much good. Lady Spencer found her at ten years old already such an unmanageable bundle of nerves that she sent for a doctor. He, anticipating Madame Montessori, opined that discipline was likely to injure so sensitive a child; she must be allowed to do whatever she liked. This régime produced the results any sensible person might have predicted. Caroline grew worse than ever. Nor was Devonshire House the environment to put her right. There the children were alternately spoiled and neglected. Now and again they were sent for to the drawing-room to be petted and made to show off; but for most of the time they roamed about the great house unruled and uncared for, eating only off silver plate, but lucky if they got their meals at all. Their existence was utterly out of touch with that of ordinary humanity. Caroline relates that she grew up thinking bread and butter grew on trees and that the population of the world was composed half of dukes and half of beggars; and though like everything she said this was an exaggeration, yet it did contain a truth. Aristocratic Devonshire House was not the place to acquire a sense of reality.

  Finally, the philosophy to be learnt there encouraged her in all her failings. It set no value on reason or self-restraint; on the contrary, it insisted that passion and sensibility were the only virtues, that man should be guided in everything by the instinctive movements of his heart. Caroline embraced with enthusiasm a creed so consonant with her predilections. Indeed it was the determining factor in her development, for it decided the principal form her day-dreams were to take. Of her many roles, the one she assumed oftenest and with most satisfaction to herself was that of the romantic heroine; reckless and imprudent, the creature of her emotions, but sensitive, imaginative and nobly superior to the conventions that ruled pettier lives; living always in an intoxicating whirl of tragedy, ecstasy, passion and renown. The object of her whole life was to achieve an existence in which this conception of herself could be realized.

  Such a character was bound to make a bad wife. Marriage demands precisely the qualities in which she was most deficient: dependability, forbearance, above all a sense of reality. It is impossible for two people to live on such intimate terms without discovering the truth about each other’s character: and unless they are ready to accept that truth, they will never get on. Caroline, unable to understand William and furious if he understood her, inevitably quarrelled with him. Further, dissatisfied as she always was by actuality, she grew soon dissatisfied with the actualities of wedded life. She loved William as much as she could love anybody except herself, and at first she found she could fulfil her dreams by playing the unaccustomed roles of his wife and pupil. But when the glamour of novelty wore off, to be succeeded by the light of common day, she grew restless and discontented.

  This discontent was increased by the environment in which she now lived. The Lambs were the last people with whom she could feel at home. She was flustered by their loud voices, offended by their casual manners, and shocked by their cynicism. Their penetration made her vanity uneasy; and their commonsense was always bringing her down to earth with an uncomfortable bump. Worst of all, the atmosphere they created was one in which she felt herself unable to shine. The Lambs did not believe in heroines and had no taste for whimsicality. Temper and insincerity on the other hand were to them the most unpardonable of faults. Indeed they found their new relation maddening. “What is the eleventh commandment?” she once asked George Lamb. “Thou shalt not bother,” he replied in a spasm of exasperation. Among themselves the brothers and sisters alluded to her frankly as “the little beast.” Even Lord Melbourne complained that she fidgeted; as for Lady Melbourne, she found Caroline even more tiresome than her mother. Two dominating personalities both absorbed in the same man, the relations between them were bound to be strained. But they could not have got on in any circumstances. Earth and fire, sense and sensibility, realism and fantasy, the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, each was in every respect the other’s antithesis; Lady Melbourne, whose first principle it was to accept facts, Caroline, who rejected such few facts as she managed to recognize. Within a short time of William’s marriage, war had broken out between them, which was to last till death. The battle swayed this way and that. In open combat Caroline was worsted; she had not the self-command to conduct an engagement with any tactics. Lady Melbourne took every advantage of her opponent’s mistakes; crafty and relentless, she contrived to put her even more in the wrong than she was. Yet to her annoyance she found she did not reap the usual reward of her victories. Caroline, though defeated, was unsubdued. Before a week h
ad passed, she was behaving more outrageously than ever; and apparently unaware that she had ever been to blame. During the first three or four years no serious cause of quarrel arose between them. And for the time being Lady Melbourne, followed by the rest of her family, acted on her customary principle of making the best of things. The Lambs treated Caroline as a child, laughing at her vagaries when she was in a good temper; when she was cross, ignoring them. This was not, in her view, the way in which a heroine had a right to be treated. She grew more discontented than ever.

  William did not annoy her in the same way. He at least could be trusted to appreciate her. But even William, she began to discover as time went on, was not all she required. He was not distinguished enough for one thing. The man of her choice must be admired by all: William seemed quite happy to follow his tastes unnoticed by anyone. Caroline heard people say that he was never going to do anything; and influenced as she always was by her company, she began to think they must be right. This might not have mattered if he had been completely satisfactory in his relation to her. But he was not. The realist in him made him incapable of playing up to her romantic conception of what a lover should be. As early as 1807 we find her contrasting his behaviour to her at a theatre unfavourably with that of George, newly engaged to Lady Elizabeth Foster’s daughter, Caroline. “I could not help remarking the difference between a husband and a lover!” she commented. “George had been an hour and a half at the play before William appeared.” Once the honeymoon excitement was over, William’s affection had settled down into a tranquil sunshiny sentiment in keeping with his personality. This was so unlike Caroline’s idea of love that she began to doubt if he was in love at all.

  Here she was wrong. But it was true that William was not ideally suited to her. In spite of all her faults, Caroline was not altogether to blame for the failure of her marriage. At nineteen years old the good in her was still partly uncorrupted by her egotism: and someone who understood how to foster its development, might have managed to make her a possible if not a perfect wife. But this needed a very special type of man, at once firm, tender and magnetic, prepared to guide her every step, and endowed with a moral majesty that could fire her hero-worship, while keeping her in healthy fear of his disapproval. Poor William! He was the last man to fill this role. Apart from anything else he was far too young. Love had inveigled him into matrimony before he was ready for it. He was still too preoccupied with forming his own tastes, and discovering his own point of view, to assume the responsibilities of a husband. But at no age would he have been the right husband for Caroline. For it was not in him to be an autocrat. The masterfulness he had shown on his honeymoon was the unique effect of an unprecedented burst of emotion. When this cooled, he relapsed into the man his temperament and Lady Melbourne had made him; passive, self-protective, indulgent, his first principle to let people alone, his first instinct to avoid trouble. Nor was he able to encourage Caroline’s idealism. He did not believe in it. Attractive though they might be, at bottom he thought her high-flown fancies great nonsense; and he could not resist telling her so. His dark eyes agleam with mischief, he twitched aside, one by one, the veils of rose-coloured sentimentalism with which Devonshire House tried to cover sought to hide the seamy side of life; exposed the weaknesses of the characters she had been brought up to revere; pointed out the fallacies involved in the religious and moral systems that commanded the respect of average mankind. Even his own relation to her was not protected from the disillusioning light of his realism. At the same time he assured her that he loved her, it amused him also to tell her that he had loved before, to recount the chronicles of earlier and less reputable amours. All this had its effect on Caroline. It did not make her cynical herself; this was too much against her nature. But it undermined the force of the few restraining principles of conduct implanted in her by native refinement and schoolroom education. If it was true—and William said it was—that everyone really did as they liked, and that it was silly to be shocked by them, there was clearly no reason why she should not do as she liked; and no one had the right to be shocked by her.

  In these circumstances it was only a question of time when their marriage came to grief. During its first few years it was kept together by the ardour of their youthful passion. Even then they sometimes quarrelled; but they delighted so much in each other that they were always able to make it up. But as passion faded, a change came. The differences between them rose more and more to the surface, showing themselves in a continuous mutual irritation. They were always having rows. At first they tried to make them up in the old way:

  “I think lately, my dear William,” writes Caroline in 1809, “we have been very troublesome to each other; which I take wholesale to my own account and mean to correct, leaving you in retail a few little things which I know you will correct . . . Condemn me not to silence and assist my imperfect memory. I will, on the other hand, be silent of a morning, entertaining after dinner; docile, fearless as a heroine in the last volume of her troubles, strong as a mountain tiger, and active as those young savages, Basil’s boys.”

  It needed a harder heart than William’s to resist so engaging an appeal as this: he responded to her overtures with a will. But it was no use. Caroline was a tiger all right, but not docile. However warm their reconciliations, they soon quarrelled again; more and more frequently and with growing bitterness; till gradually they abandoned the struggle to restore their marriage to its pristine harmony. Indeed the spirit needed to unite them was no longer there. Caroline went on saying she adored William: but, in fact, once her vanity was no longer involved in her love, once she had realized that William would never be able to play the part she had assigned him in her scheme of life, she ceased to care for him very much. He was more faithful. On him the Fairy Queen’s spell could never lose its power. But he had grown equally disheartened about their marriage. If it were not Caroline’s fault—and he hated to think it was—it must be a fault inherent in the nature of the relationship. He became profoundly disillusioned about marriage itself. In his Commonplace Book he noted down with caustic melancholy the conclusions forced on him by his experience of the matrimonial state:

  “The general reason against marriage is this—that two minds, however congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the other, can never act like one.

  By taking a wife a man certainly adds to the list of those who have a right to interfere with and advise him, and he runs the risk of putting in his own way another very strong and perhaps insuperable obstacle to his acting according to his own opinions and inclinations.

  By marrying you place yourself upon the defensive instead of the offensive in society, which latter is admitted to be in all contentions the most advantageous mode of proceeding.

  Before marriage the shape, the figure, the complexion carry all before them; after marriage the mind and character un-expectedly claim their share, and that the largest, of importance.

  Before I was married, whenever I saw the children and the dogs allowed, or rather caused, to be troublesome in any family, I used to lay it all to the fault of the master of it, who might at once put a stop to it if he pleased. Since I have married, I find that this was a very rash and premature judgment.”

  No—experience had proved his old philosophy of detachment only too true. His first attempt to leave his patch of neutrality had turned out as disastrous as he could have feared: trying to combine one’s life with that of someone else ended inevitably in failure. Further he found that it had a deplorable effect on his character. Under the unprecedented strain imposed by the intimacy of married life, his naturally hot temper broke through the smooth surface under which he had, since childhood, managed to conceal it. Caroline began the rows; but, once his patience was exhausted, William raged even more violently than she did. Lack of control shocked his most sacred convictions: each time he lost his temper he apologized to her in horror-stricken remorse. But he began to find out that he could
not restrain himself except by avoiding the occasion of anger; and that the only way to do this was to keep out of Caroline’s way. By 1810 their relationship had insensibly slipped on to a new footing. They still had jokes in common, still wrote and talked to one another about books and politics. But they went their own ways; each had begun elsewhere than in the other to seek his chief satisfaction in life.

  Chapter Five

  The House of Commons

  William, like most men, turned for consolation to his work. Whether it was the sort of work best suited to him is doubtful. The speculative mind finds little opportunity to exercise itself in the humdrum mixture of compromise and practical business, which is Parliamentary life. William was interested not in getting things done, but in discovering truth. Faced with a political problem, his mind sought instinctively less to solve it than to divine its causes: and thence to discern what light they cast on the general laws governing human affairs. Where others proposed a plan of action, he made a generalization. Further, English politics are party politics. And William recognized facts far too clearly to imagine that any single party could ever be wholly in the right. He might stick to a leader from loyalty or affection, but never with that blind conviction which makes party warfare a pleasure.