Lady Hester Stanhope was born in 1776. She came of a good stock: her father was that democratic and practical nobleman who invented an ingenious printing-press, and erased his armorial bearings from his plate and furniture; her mother was the eldest daughter of William Pitt, the "great Earl of Chatham." It was at Burton-Pynsent, her illustrious grandfather's country seat, she spent her early years, displaying that boldness of spirit and love of independence which marked her later career, training and riding the most unmanageable horses, and shocking society not a little by her disregard of its conventionalities. She inherited from her parents great force of character, intellectual faculties of no common order, and something, probably, of her eccentricity of disposition. A large and liberal education developed these natural powers, which were in themselves remarkable, and as
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she grew up to womanhood her sagacious estimates of policy and her sound judgment of men and things secured her respect in the highest political circles. To her cousin, the younger Pitt—"the pilot who weathered the storm," in the language of poetry; who died when it was at its height, in the language of fact—her advice was always acceptable. It was always freely given, for her admiration of her distinguished kinsman was unbounded. In the last months of his life, when he was stricken by a mortal disease, and sinking under the burden of political disaster, she was assiduous in her attendance upon him; and it was to her, after the memorable battle of Austerlitz, he addressed those historic words, so pathetic in their expression of failure, "Roll up that map (the map of Europe), it will not be wanted these two years."
After the death of Mr. Pitt, Lady Hester abandoned the gay and polished society of which she had been an acknowledged ornament, and quitted England. This defection society was by no means able to understand. That a woman of high birth, and rank, and wealth, the niece of one great minister and the kinswoman of another, should deliberately renounce the advantages of her position, was a circumstance unintelligible to ordinary minds, and thenceforth she shared with Lord Byron the curiosity and speculation of the public. Her singular independence of thought and character had already invested her with a fatal reputation for "eccentricity," and to "eccentricity" her action was very generally
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attributed. Some, indeed, were pleased to cast upon it a gleam of romance, and protested that it was brought about by her sweet sorrow for a young English officer of high rank who had perished on one of the battle-fields of the Peninsula. Others, who were nearer the truth, ascribed it to a love of adventure. But, in plain truth, the ruling motive was pride, a colossal, an all-absorbing pride, which could be satisfied only by power and influence, and a foremost place. Her great kinsman's death had necessarily excluded her from the councils of ministers, and closed upon her the doors of cabinets. The ordinary pursuits of society afforded her no gratification, opened up no channel in which her restless energies could expend themselves. She was of too strong a mind, of too clear an intellect, to value the ephemeral influence enjoyed by wealth or beauty; she wanted to reign, to rule, to govern, and as that was no longer a possibility in the political world, she resolved upon seeking some new sphere where she would always be first. It was this illimitable pride, this uncontrolled ambition, which weakened and obscured the elements of true greatness in her character, a character which cannot fail to possess an extraordinary interest for the psychological public.
After traversing Europe with impetuous feet she visited Athens in company with Mr. Bruce. Here she made the acquaintance of Lord Byron. In the language of Mr. Moore, one of the first objects that met the eyes of the
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distinguished travellers, on their approaching the coast of Attica, was the noble poet, "disporting in his favourite element under the rocks of Colonna." They were afterwards introduced to each other by Lord Sligo, and it was in the course of their first interview at Lord Sligo's table that Lady Hester, with that "lively eloquence" for which she was remarkable, briskly assailed the author of "Childe Harold" for the depreciating opinion he was supposed to entertain of all female intellect. Being but little inclined, were he even able, to sustain such a heresy against one who was in her own person such an irresistible refutation of it, Lord Byron had no other refuge from the fair orator's arguments than in assent and silence; and this well-bred deference being, in a sensible woman's eyes, equivalent to concession, they became, thenceforward, most cordial friends.
At Constantinople, which she next visited, Lady Hester remained for several years. There was much in the gorgeous life of the East to charm her fancy and gratify her besetting weakness. She delighted in the implicit submission to her orders, in the almost servile obedience which Orientals pay to their superiors, in the sharp contrast between the old and the new civilization. After awhile, however, she wearied even of the Golden City—it was not remote enough from Western ideas, nor did it offer that solitary and independent throne which her ambitious and restless spirit coveted. She resolved on seeking it amid the glowing plains of Syria; and with this view embarked on board an English merchant-vessel,
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which she had loaded with her property, with pearls of considerable value, and with a large amount of costly presents designed to purchase the homage or allegiance of the Syrian tribes.
Caught in a violent storm, the ship was wrecked on a reef near the island of Rhodes. The waves swallowed up Lady Hester's treasures, and she herself barely escaped with life. On a small desert island she remained for four-and-twenty hours without food or shelter, until happily discovered by some Levantine fishermen, who conveyed her to Rhodes.
Returning to England, she hastened to collect the remains of her scattered fortune, sold a portion of her estates, chartered another vessel, and a second time sailed for the East. The voyage was not marked by any contrary incident, and Lady Hester safely disembarked at Latakia, a small port of Syria, between Tripoli and Alexandretta.
In the neighbourhood she hired a house, and began the study of Arabic, while busily preparing for her Syrian travels.
Having acquired a tolerable knowledge of the language, customs, and manners of the people, Lady Hester organized a numerous caravan, and proceeded to visit every part of Syria. She halted in succession at Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baulbek, and Palmyra—everywhere maintaining an almost regal state—and by the stateliness of her demeanour and the splendour of her pretensions producing a powerful
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impression on the wandering Arab tribes, who proclaimed her Queen of Palmyra and paid her an enthusiastic homage.
After several years of migratory enterprise, during which her pretensions gradually grew bolder and stronger as her own faith in them increased, she at length fixed her abode in an almost inaccessible solitude of the wild Lebanon, near Saïd—the ancient Sidon—a concession of the ruined convent and village of Djoun, a settlement of the Druses, having been granted by the Pastor of St. Jean d'Acre. There she erected her tent. The convent was a broad, grey mass of irregular building, which, from its position, as well as from the gloomy blankness of its walls, gave the idea of a neglected fortress; it had, in fact, been a convent of great size, and like most of the religious houses in this part of the world, had been made strong enough for opposing an inert resistance to any mere casual band of assailants who might be unprovided with regular means of attack. This she filled with a large retinue of dragomen, women, slaves, and Albanian guards. She lived like an independent princess, with a court of her own, a territory of her own, and it must be added, laws of her own; carrying on political relations with the Porte, with Beschir the celebrated Emir of the Lebanon, and the numerous sheikhs of the Syrian deserts. Over these sheikhs and these tribes she exercised at one time a singular influence. Mr. Kinglake reports that her connection with the Bedawun began by her making a large present of money (£500, an immense
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sum in piastres) to the chief whose authority was recognized between Damascus and Palmyra. "The prestige," he says, "created by the rumours of her high and undefined rank, as well as of her wealth and corresponding magnificence, was well sustained by her imperious character and dauntless bravery."
Lady Hester, in conversation with the European visitors, would occasionally mention some of the circumstances that assisted her to secure an influence amounting almost to sovereignty.
"The Bedawun, so often engaged in irregular warfare, strains his eyes to the horizon in search of a coming enemy just as habitually as the sailor keeps his 'bright look out' for a strange sail. In the absence of telescopes a far-reaching sight is highly valued; and Lady Hester had this power. She told me that on one occasion, when there was good reason to expect hostilities, a far-seeing Arab created great excitement in the camp by declaring that he could distinguish some moving objects upon the very farthest point within the reach of his eyes. Lady Hester was consulted, and she instantly assured her comrades in arms that there were indeed a number of horses within sight, but that they were without riders: the assertion proved to be correct, and from that time forth her superiority over all others in respect of far sight remained undisputed."
We may quote another anecdote, because it has a double significance, illustrating not only the character of
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Lady Hester, but the temperament of the wandering race over whom she sought to rule.
She was marching one day along with the military array of the tribe. Observing that they were making preparations for an engagement, she inquired the reason, and, after some attempt at mystification on the part of the sheikh, was informed that war had been declared against the tribe on account of its alliance with the English princess, and they were consequently exposed to attack by a highly superior force. The sheikh contrived to let Lady Hester see that she was the teterrima causa belli, and that the contention would readily be appeased but for his recognition of the sacredness of the duty of protecting the Englishwoman whom he had received as his guest; at the same time his tribe would probably experience a crushing disaster. Lady Hester's resolution was immediately taken: she would not for one moment suffer a calamity to fall upon her friends which it was in her power to avert. She could go forth alone, trusting in herself and her ability to encounter and overcome danger. Of course the sheikh professed his objection to her determination, and candidly told her that though, if she left them, they would be instantly able to negotiate the conditions of an arrangement, yet they could do nothing for her, and that the enemy's horsemen would sweep the desert so closely as to render impossible her escape into any other district.
No fear of danger, however, could move the calm, courageous soul of Lady Hester. She bade farewell to
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the tribe, turned her horse's head, and rode away into the wilderness alone. Hour after hour passed away, and still, with the hot sun overhead, and round her the solitude of the desert, she rode onward. Suddenly her keen eye sighted some horsemen in the distance. They drew nearer and nearer; evidently they were making direct towards her; and eventually some hundreds of fully-armed Bedawun galloped up to her, with fierce, hoarse shouts, brandishing their spears as if they thirsted for her blood. Her face, at the time, was covered, as is the Eastern custom, with her yashmak; but just as the spears of the foremost horsemen glittered close to her horse's head, she raised her stately figure in her stirrups, drew aside the yashmak that veiled her majestic countenance, waved her arm slowly and disdainfully, and with a loud voice cried, "Avaunt!"
The horsemen, we are told,[20] recoiled from her glance, but not in terror. "The threatening yells of the assailants were suddenly changed for loud shouts of joy and admiration at the bravery of the stately Englishwoman, and festive gunshots were fired on all sides around her honoured head. The truth was that the party belonged to the tribe with which she had allied herself, and that the threatened attack, as well as the pretended apprehension of an engagement, had been contrived for the mere purpose of testing her courage. The day ended in a great feast, prepared to do honour to the heroine, and
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from that time her power over the minds of the people grew rapidly."
This was probably the happiest, or at least the most successful, period of her career. Her ambition was satisfied—
she felt herself a power; her pride received no wounds, and her will no check. But by degrees clouds gathered on the horizon: her subjects, if ever they were her subjects, grew impatient of a rule which did not fulfil their longings after military empire. Her immense expenditure told upon her fortune, and its gradual diminution compelled her to withhold the presents she had formerly bestowed with so lavish a hand. She awoke at last to a perception of the hollowness of her authority. Meanwhile, many of the attendants who had accompanied her from Europe died; others returned to their native country. She was left almost alone in her Lebanon retreat, with only the shadow of her former power. The sense of failure must have been very bitter, but she bore herself with all her wonted pride, and made neither complaint nor confession. Without bestowing a regret on the past, she encountered misfortune and ingratitude with a composed countenance, facing them as fearlessly as she had faced the Bedawun of the desert. She yielded nothing, either to the old age which was creeping upon her, or the desertion of the ungrateful wretches who had profited so largely by her generosity. Alone she lived, with the great mountain peaks closing in upon her
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remote abode—without books, without friends; attended by a few young negresses, a few black slaves, and a handful of Arab peasants, who took charge of her gardens and stables, and watched over the safety of her person.
The love of power, however, was still strong within her, and as her worldly authority slipped away, she endeavoured to replace it by a spiritual. The energy of her temper and the extraordinary force of her character found expression in exalted religious ideas, in which the "illuminationism" of Europe was strangely blended with the subtleties of the Oriental faiths and the mysteries of mediæval astrology. To what extreme they carried her it is difficult to say. It has been hinted that she dreamed of being united in a nuptial union with her Saviour, reviving the old illusion of St. Catherine of Siéna. There is no doubt that at times she claimed to be the possessor of divine power; there is no doubt that she was not always a believer in her own claims. Her intellect was too strong for her imagination. As Miss Martineau remarks, "She saw and knew things which others could not see or know; she had curious glimpses of prescience; but she could not depend upon her powers, nor always separate realities from mere dreams."
Occasionally a visitor from the active world of the West broke in upon her loneliness—but only by permission—
and, if he were a man of quick sympathies, would draw her out of herself. Her revelations, under such circumstances, were always of deep interest.
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Alphonse de Lamartine, the French poet, orator, and man of letters, obtained admission to her presence, though not without difficulty, in 1832, when she was standing on the threshold of old age. He has left us a graphic record of the interview.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when he was informed that Lady Hester was ready to receive him. After traversing a court, a garden, a day-kiosk, with jasmine hangings, then two or three gloomy corridors, a small negro boy introduced him into her cabinet. So profound an obscurity prevailed there, that at first he could scarcely distinguish the noble, grave, sweet, yet majestic features of the white figure which, clothed in Oriental costume, rose from her couch, and extended to him her hands.
To her visitor Lady Hester seemed about fifty years of age; she was really fifty-six; she was still beautiful—
beautiful with that beauty which lies in the form itself, in the purity of the lines, in the majesty, the thought which irradiate the countenance. On her head she wore a white turban; from her forehead a veil, or yashmak, of purple wool fell down to her shoulders. A long shawl of yellow cashmere, an ample Turkish robe of white silk, with hanging sleeves, enveloped her whole person in their simple and majestic folds; so that you could but catch a glimpse, where this outer tunic opened on the bosom, of a second robe of Persian stuff, which was fastened at the throat by a clasp of pearls. Turkish boots of yellow morocco, embroidered in silk, completed her costume.
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"You have come a great distance," said Lady Hester to her visitor,[21] "to see a hermit; you are welcome, I receive few strangers, but your letter pleased me, and I felt anxious to know a person who, like myself, loved God, and nature, and solitude. Something told me, moreover, that our stars were friendly, and that our sympathies would prove a bond of union. Be seated, and let us converse.
"You are one of those men," she said, "whom I await; whom Providence sends to me; who have a great part to accomplish in the work that Fate is getting ready. You will shortly return to Europe. Well, Europe is worn out; France alone has a great mission before her; in this you will participate, though I know not how, but I can tell you this evening if you wish it, after I have consulted the stars."
"As yet," she continued—evidently her keen perception had detected her visitor's vanity, and she skilfully played upon it—"as yet, I do not know the names of all. I see more than three, however; I can distinguish four, perhaps five, and—who knows?—still more. One of them is certainly Mercury, which bestows clearness and colour upon intelligence and speech. You will become a poet—I see it in your eyes, and in the upper part of your face; in the lower you are under the sway
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of widely different stars, almost all of them of opposite characters. I discern, too, the influence of the sun in the pose of your head, and in the manner in which you throw it back on the left shoulder. What is your name?"
Lamartine, who had already won distinction as a poet, told her.
"I had never heard it," she exclaimed, with a convincing accent of sincerity; "but, poet or not, I like you, and have hope for you."
"Go," she added; "dinner is served. Dine quickly, and return soon. I go to meditate upon you, and to see more clearly into the confusion of my ideas respecting your person and your future."
Lamartine had scarcely concluded his dinner when Lady Hester sent for him. He found her smoking a long Oriental pipe, the fellow of which she ordered to be brought for his own use. Accustomed to see the most graceful women of the East with their tchibouques, he was neither surprised nor shocked by the gracious, nonchalant attitude, or the light wreaths of perfumed smoke issuing from Lady Hester's finely curved lips, interrupting the conversation without chilling it. They conversed together for a long time upon the favourite subject—the unique, mysterious theme of that extraordinary woman, or the modern Circe of the Desert, who so completely recalled to mind the famous female magicians of antiquity. The religious opinions of Lady Hester seemed to her guest a skilful though confused mixture of the
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various creeds among which she was condemned—or had condemned herself—to live.
"Mystical as the Druses, with whose mysterious secrets she alone, perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she practised—she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists. A strange and yet sublime medley, which it is much easier to stigmatize as lunatic than to analyze and comprehend. But Lady Hester Stanhope was no lunatic. Madness, which reveals itself only too clearly in the victim's eyes, was not to be detected in her frank, direct look—madness, which invariably betrays itself in conversation, which it involuntarily interrupts by sudden, irregular, and eccentric outbreaks, was nowhere discernible in Lady Hester's exalted, mystical, and cloudy, but sustained, connected and vigorous monologues.
"If," adds M. de Lamartine, "I were to offer an opinion, I should rather say it was a voluntary and studied madness, which knew what it was about, and had its own reasons for posing as madness. The patent admiration which her genius has excited, and still excites, among the Arab tribes, is a sufficient proof that this pretended insanity is only a means to an end."
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In the course of conversation, Lady Hester suddenly said to her guest:
"I hope that you are an aristocrat; but I cannot doubt it when I look at you."
"You are mistaken, madam," replied the man of sentiment, "I am neither aristocrat nor democrat; I have lived long enough to see both sides of the medal of humanity, and to find them equally hollow. No, I am neither aristocrat nor democrat; I am a man, and an ardent partisan of all which can ameliorate and perfect the whole man, whether he be born at the summit or at the foot of the social ladder. I am neither for the people nor the great, but for all humanity; and I am unable to believe that either aristocratic or democratic institutions possess the exclusive virtue of raising humanity to the highest standard. This virtue lies only in a divine morality, the fruit of a perfect religion!
The civilization of the peoples—it is their faith!"
We shall shortly see that Lady Hester, with her quick insight into character, an insight sharpened by long and varied experience, took "the measure" of her visitor very accurately, and lightly estimated the vanity, self-consciousness, and inflated sentimentality which weakened the genius of Lamartine and marred his career, both for his country and himself.
She invited him to visit her garden—a sanctuary into which the profanum vulgus were never allowed to penetrate.
Here is his description of it, somewhat exaggerated in colouring:
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—
"Gloomy trellises, the verdurous roofs of which bore, like thousands of lustres, the gleaming grapes of the Promised Land; kiosks, where carved arabesques were entertwined with jasmines and climbing plants, the lianas of Asia; basins, into which the waters—artificial they are here—flowed from afar to leap and murmur in the marble jets of alleys lined with all the fruit trees of England, of Europe, and of the sunny Eastern climates; green leaves besprinkled with blossoming shrubs, and marble beds enclosing sheaves of flowers."
She also exhibited to her famous guest, if, indeed, he may be implicitly credited, the noted mare which realized ancient prophecy, in which nature had accomplished all that is written on the animal destined to the honour of carrying the Messiah—"She will be born ready saddled." He says: "And in truth, I saw, on this beautiful animal, a freak of nature, rare enough to encourage the illusion of a vulgar credulity among half-barbarous peoples: instead of shoulders, she had a cavity so broad and deep, and so exactly imitating the shape of a Turkish saddle, that one might truthfully say she was born ready saddled, and, with stirrups at hand, one might readily have mounted her without a saddle." This magnificent bay mare was the object of profound respect and admiration on the part of Lady Stanhope and her slaves; she had never been ridden, and a couple of Arab grooms cared for her and watched her carefully, never losing sight of her.
A few years later, and the brilliant author
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"Eöthen," Mr. A. W. Kinglake, while travelling in the East, made his way to Lady Hester's Lebanon retreat. She had been the friend of his mother, and consequently he had no difficulty in obtaining admission.
In the first court which he entered a number of fierce-looking and ill-clad Albanian soldiers were hanging about the place, a couple of them smoking their tchibouques, the remainder lying torpidly upon the flat stones. He rode on to an inner part of the building, dismounted, and passed through a doorway that led him at once from an open court into an apartment on the ground floor. There he was received by Lady Hester's doctor, with a command from the doctor's mistress that her visitor would rest and refresh himself after the fatigues of the journey. After dinner, which was of the usual Oriental kind, but included the wine of the Lebanon, he was conducted into a small chamber where sat the lady prophetess. She rose from her seat very formally, uttered a few words of welcome, pointed to a chair placed exactly opposite to her sofa, at two yards' distance, and remained standing up to the full of her majestic height, perfectly still and motionless, until he had taken his appointed position. She then resumed her seat—not after the fashion of the Orientals—but allowing her feet to rest on the floor or footstool, and covering her lap with a mass of loose white drapery.[22]
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The woman before him had exactly the person of a prophetess; not, indeed, of the divine Sibyl, imagined by Dammichino, but of a good, business-like, practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred calling.
Her large commanding features reminded him of the great statesman, her grandfather, as he is seen in Copley's famous picture; her face was of surprising whiteness; she wore a very large turban, composed of pale cashmere shawls, and so arranged as to conceal the hair; her dress, from the chin down to the point at which it was concealed by the drapery on her lap, was a mass of white linen loosely folding—an ecclesiastical sort of affair—
more like a surplice than any of those blessed creations which our souls love under the names of "dress," and
"frock," and "bodice," and "collar," and "habit-shirt," and sweet "chemisette."
Such was the outward seeming of Lady Hester Stanhope, the grand-daughter of Chatham, the adviser of Pitt, the Queen of Palmyra, the prophetess of the Lebanon—she who, in her life, had played so many parts, but in all had given full rein to her master-passion, pride. And assuredly the moralist who, commenting on the disastrous effect of this passion, should need an illustration to point his moral and adorn his tale, could find none more striking than Lady Hester Stanhope's career affords.
A couple of black slaves appeared at a signal, and
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supplied their mistress and her visitor with lighted tchibouques and coffee.
"The custom of the East sanctions, and almost commands, some moments of silence whilst you are inhaling the first few breaths of the fragrant pipe. The pause was broken, I think, by my lady, who addressed to me some inquiries respecting my mother, and particularly as to her marriage; but before I had communicated any great amount of family facts, the spirit of the prophetess kindled within her, and presently (though with all the skill of a woman of the world) she shuffled away the subject of poor, dear Somersetshire, and bounded onward into other spheres of thought....
"For hours and hours this wondrous white woman poured forth her speech, for the most part concerning sacred and profane mysteries; but every now and then she would stay her lofty flight, and swoop down upon the world again. Whenever this happened I was interested in her conversation."
In reference to her mode of life, she informed her guest that for her sin, or sins, she had subjected herself during many years to severe penance, and that her self-denial had not been without reward. "Vain and false," she declared, "was all the pretended knowledge of the Europeans. Their doctors asserted that the drinking of milk gave yellowness to the complexion; yet milk was her only food, and was not her face white?" Her intellectual abstemiousness was not less severe than
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her physical self-denial. Upon book or newspaper she never cast a glance, but trusted wholly to the stars for her sublime knowledge. Her nights she usually spent in absorbed communion with these silent but eloquent teachers, and took her rest during the daytime. She spoke contemptuously of the frivolity