i

THERE are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediæval village. It is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak which is the clock-tower with its pointed roof; it might be the spire of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediæval village. At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent, with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.”

Such is the opening page of V. Sackville-West’s volume, Knole and the Sackvilles, a handsomely printed and illustrated account of the seat of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset. Authentic record of the family goes not beyond that Herbrand de Sackville who came to England with William the Conqueror. Knole, bought by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456, and held by Cardinal Morton, Cranmer, Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary and Elizabeth, was granted, in 1586 by Elizabeth, to Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, first Earl of Dorset. The name “West” enters with the marriage of Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the fourth Duke, to John West, Earl de la Warr.

The house, of seven courts to correspond with the days of the week, fifty-two staircases matching the weeks of the year and 365 rooms answering to the days of the year[1] “is gentle and venerable. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house.” The garden side is the gay, the princely side. When, in summer, the great oak doors of the second gatehouse were left open, “it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.”

ii

In 1825 the duchess Arabella Diana died and her estate devolved upon her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as has been told, became the wife of Lord de la Warr. Dying in 1870 she left Buckhurst to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was Miss Sackville-West’s grandfather. He was eighty and she perhaps eight, and as he shared “the family failing of unsociability” it fell to the child’s lot to show the house to visitors. In this, as in more natural ways, she became highly familiar with Knole and from her earliest years must have loved the place. On receipt of a telegram that people were coming, Grandpapa would take the next train for London, “returning in the evening when the coast was clear.” The Cartoon Gallery, the Leicester Gallery, the Brown Gallery; Lady Betty Germaine’s bedchamber; the three principal bedrooms, the Spangled Room, the Venetian Ambassador’s and the King’s chamber, “the only vulgar room in the house” with furniture made entirely in silver and articles of silver, “even to a little eye-bath”—the procession of the days and years was not more certain than the procession of the curious, the inquisitive and the wonder-struck through these. You will fashion your own picture of the daughter of the Sackvilles standing before the portrait of Lady Margaret Sackville (over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting room) and endeavouring, quite vainly, to do her own hair in the elaborate manner of young Lady Margaret’s. Or, it may be, she had been naughty that day, and had hid herself inside the pulpit of the Chapel of the Archbishops, where, in spite of private steps leading out of her bedroom straight into the Family Pew, “they never found me.” Grandpapa was “a queer and silent old man,” as Miss Sackville-West remembers him. “He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave demoiselle cranes.... He and I, who so often shared the house alone between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand a child.... When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him—and never knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me—and sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy, and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London; of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but ‘my Lord’ and ‘my Lady.’ I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to bed....”

iii

At the age of thirteen Miss Sackville-West wrote “an enormous novel” about the figure of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, who seemed to her the embodiment of Cavalier romance. And perhaps he was. “He had the advantage of starting with the Vandyck portrait in the hall, the flame-coloured doublet, the blue Garter, the characteristic swaggering attitude, the sword, the love-locks, the key of office painted dangling from his hip and the actual key dangling on a ribbon from the frame of the picture.” The dashing career of this follower of King Charles, who fought a duel with Lord Bruce and whose younger son was murdered by the Roundheads, became “a source of rich romance to a youthful imagination nourished on Cyrano and The Three Musketeers.” The half-grown girl re-examined certain old nail-studded trunks in the attics, mute witnesses to Cromwellian violence, some of them curved to fit the roof of a barouche. “The battered trunks were stacked near the entrance to the hiding-place, which, without the smallest justification save an old candlestick and a rope-ladder found therein, I peopled with the fugitive figures of priests and Royalists. I peeped into the trunks: they contained only a dusty jumble of broken ironwork, some old books, some bits of hairy plaster fallen from the ceiling, some numbers of Punch for 1850. Nevertheless, there were the gaping holes where the locks had been prised off the trunks, and the lid forced back upon the hinges by an impatient hand. Down in the Poets’ Parlour, where I lunched with my grandfather, taciturn unless he happened to crack one of his little stock-in-trade of jokes, Cromwell’s soldiers had held their Court of Sequestration. The Guard Room was empty of arms or armour, save for a few pikes and halberds, because Cromwell’s soldiers had taken all the armour away. The past mingled with the present in constant reminder; and out in the summer-house, after luncheon, with the bees blundering among the flowers of the Sunk Garden and the dragon-flies flashing over the pond, I returned to the immense ledger in which I was writing my novel, while Grandpapa retired to his little sitting-room and whittled paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes, and thought about—Heaven knows what he thought about.”

iv

Miss Sackville-West is writing of Knole, of course, in her long story called The Heir. The manor of Blackboys with its peacocks is not Knole; I suppose no one makes the mistake of literal identification of people and places in fiction; at least, none should do so. What is truly identifiable is never anything tangible at all; it is merely an emotion. When we read The Heir, subtitled “A Love Story,” and acquaint ourselves in a leisurely sufficience with the fellow Chase we should be stupid indeed if we grasped at the substance and neglected the shadow. It is shadow and its correspondent sunlight for which, after all, mankind lives a life wherein the things of substance are the final unreality....

But her first book, which was brought to the attention of the American publisher by Hugh Walpole, was a novel called Heritage, an unusual story of young lovers. The breath of distinction upon the tale more than redeemed its faults of construction, of which, perhaps, after all, the most serious was merely the device of a letter immensely longer than any epistle probable to be written. Then, in point of publication, at least, came The Dragon in Shallow Waters, also a novel. Some two years elapsed before the appearance of her third novel, Challenge, a piece of work of such a character as to demand our earnest scrutiny. Challenge is being followed by Grey Wethers and The Heir.

I have been speaking of American publication; in England Miss Sackville-West first came to notice as a poet. Her Poems of West and East was followed by another collection called Orchard and Vineyard. Her work in verse exhibited austerity of expression joined to an emotional and descriptive power difficult to appraise. Although it may be, as has been said, that the chief use of poetry, written when one is young, is to produce a finer prose when one is older.

Of The Heir it is best to say little since a few betraying words can so easily spoil its secret for the reader. In the same volume appear The Christmas Party, Patience, Her Son and The Parrot, a vignette dedicated to “H. G. N.” All the qualities present in The Heir may be found in the other tales, so varyingly shorter—delicacy, precision, dramatic power and a perception of beauty translated almost without the use of a single emotional word. In The Christmas Party we have the deferred revenge of a woman, a theatrical costumer, upon her strait-minded family; Patience is an elderly man’s recollection, in perfectly domesticated surroundings, of his youthful affair; Her Son is the inevitable cruelty inflicted upon a mother by the passage of the years; the story of The Parrot points to the only escape from the ... cage.

The “H. G. N.” of its dedication is the Honourable Harold G. Nicolson. Except as an author, the lady of Knole is no longer Victoria Sackville-West but the Honourable Mrs. Harold G. Nicolson.

v

Challenge, a novel that may instructively be compared with Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, had the curious fortune to be published first in America and—what is more remarkable—only in America. It might seem altogether extraordinary that one of the most noteworthy novels by an Englishwoman in years should not only not be published first in England but should not be published there at all. It might seem very extraordinary; and it is. The circumstances were perhaps without a precedent and, it may be hoped, will be without a duplication. In 1920 an English publisher had accepted Challenge and prepared it for issuance. That is to say, type had been set, plates had been cast, the sheets of the novel had been printed, folded and sewed. Nothing remained but to encase them in cloth—a matter of a week, usually—when the book would be ready to go on sale. It was the eleventh hour; 11.59 to be precise. Then fate intervened.

It transpired (or was allowed to transpire) that Miss Sackville-West had written her novel about an actual family, portraying that family in general and possibly in particular. The family was part of her own, or shall we say, connected with her own; and it was not without influence. This influence was immediately exerted to secure the suppression of Challenge. How far the influence succeeded, by virtue of its own force and considerations, and how far it was aided by the peculiarity of the English libel law, which recognises technical libel, I am unable to say; but succeed it did. Challenge remained unbound and the English house either put it down as a loss or, with a sanguineness born of much publishing experience, carried it in its inventory. There were all those folded and sewed sheets constituting a very fair-sized edition, as English editions go, packed away in some sufficiently dry place. At Knole and in Cornwall and it may be in other places Miss Sackville-West continued writing.

Probably the only challenge to the suppressors of the novel in England lay in the single figurative word of the title. Miss Sackville-West could be said to be writing of the actual family only in the same sense that we can say, in alluding to the manor of Blackboys in The Heir, that she writes of Knole. Some South American republic, indeed, any South American republic, would be equally justified in beginning suit for libel against Conrad for the picture of Costaguana in Nostromo—could a court be discovered in which such a suit would be justiciable? It is charitable to suppose that the suppressors beheld themselves mirrored in the pages of Challenge because they were victims of a narcism complex. However, the interesting disabilities of these people were of no serious importance on this side of the Atlantic; Miss Sackville-West had done no work of such importance as the unborn Challenge; and after all those unbound sheets had lain untouched for two years or longer the day came when an American publisher took the whole lot, together with the plates to enable him to print more, and Challenge saw the light in the United States early in 1923.

It is still unpublishable in England and seems destined indefinitely to remain so. Not indignation nor ridicule is likely to alter this state of affairs, since the prototypes of Miss Sackville-West’s Davenants must be conceived of as resembling Galsworthy’s Forsytes in one respect: They are almost certainly impervious to the wrath or derision of any except their own kind, and this will hardly be forthcoming.

Challenge, admirable in its technique, begins with an epilogue, giving us through the eyes of disinterested bystanders a glimpse of Julian Davenant many years afterward. We see him with his wife at a great affair in London. He has power, wealth, distinction; and his wife is perfectly equipped for her rôle. Many people expect that Davenant will be the next Viceroy; he has already been in the Cabinet. A cynical man, who believes in nothing—and a philanthropist, really. His face, or his eyes, give one the impression that he has “learnt all the sorrow of the world”; they are inexpressibly weary. And the two onlookers, a man and a woman, recall that there was some “crazy adventure” in Julian Davenant’s youth. “Very romantic, but we all start by being romantic until we have outgrown it.”

The three parts which follow narrate in a strictly chronological order the details of that “crazy adventure.” Julian Davenant was the young son of a house of English Levantines, that is to say, an English family established for several generations in the Levant and possessing, at the time of the story, besides much land, the site of valuable vineyards, prestige and influence and political power. It will be recalled that the Goulds of Costaguana in Nostromo constituted a similar clan. Such English exoterics (not to say exotics) are only moderately rare. It is not proper to speak of them as hybrids, since in their marriages they are careful to avoid a non-English admixture and their sons are invariably sent to England for their education. Without in any essential degree sacrificing a single one of those peculiarly tenacious English traits of character and without any alteration of the English habit of thought, they are in most other matters assimilated to the country of their holdings. They come to understand it, its ways, its habit of thought and policy of conduct and instinct of behaviour with a completeness that amounts to perfection and reposes, as a rule and deep down, on a sincere distaste. They are really marvellous, whether Goulds in South America or Davenants in Greece. And their young men....

In any comparison of Nostromo and Challenge it will be found that the most obvious likenesses are purely superficial. In Nostromo we have the son, Charles Gould, determined to avenge, by a patient commercialism and a silent political sagacity, the fate of his Uncle Harry and the killing worry of his father; the instrumentality to his hand is the silver of the mine. In Challenge young Julian Davenant is the victim of the romantic impulse which causes him to respond, at any cost, to the patriotic appeal of the Islands lying off the coast and unwillingly a part of the tiny republic of Herakleion. The girl, Eve, and the woman, Kato, a native of the Islands and a famous singer, are the personal contending forces in the struggle over Julian Davenant. Eve is Julian’s cousin. In the developing story of her love for Julian, in its culminating struggle and final disaster a precise comparison with Nostromo—even in respect of the tragedy that befell Linda Viola—is a waste of our attention.

vi

What may profitably be compared in Mr. Conrad’s acknowledged masterpiece and Miss Sackville-West’s dramatic novel is the identity of method and art. I say “identity” without any hesitation, for in both cases I think the artist has achieved a proportionately impressive and living and beautiful result. As to method, the reader will observe for himself that either novel might have been written by either author. In each case the actual knowledge of a totally foreign country is perhaps the same, and in neither case is it very great or very important. Again, in each case, the imaginative creation is on a plane so much above the level attained in other (and very excellent) novels that the book must definitely be set in a class apart. One accounts for the intense imaginative insight of The Old Wives’ Tale and My Antonia (to choose two especially fine examples) by saying that, after all, both Arnold Bennett and Willa Cather had the immeasurable aid of childhood’s unblunted perceptiveness; and in so partially accounting for the sheer fact, one does quite rightly. But neither memory nor the deepest well of sympathy serves to explain Nostromo and Challenge; in these two novels the imagination had to create something de novo and actively body it forth; memories, hearsay, would be an actual interference and the existence of an outer world a positive interruption. They are both novels of a perfectly valid idea recreated in terms of the subconscious personality. If that is too cloudy an explanation I will ask you to think of the subconscious mind as a happily benevolent oyster, of the germ-idea as an infinitesimal particle of irritant sand, and of the accomplished story as the resulting pearl. It is as near as I can come to conveying what I mean ... and know to be at least subjectively true.

Abandoning this difficult region and ascending to the surface on which most art and literary method lies, the comparison becomes so easy that one feels superfluous in making it. Have we not the same complexity of persons presented in an intimate relation to each other and composing a little world, complete socially, politically and in their attitudes; so that we can perfectly conceive them in any set of circumstances? Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present? the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art, exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions of the reader. He is led to feel amusement, ridicule, sympathy, indignation, dismay, horror and grief; because never is it intimated to him that it is his duty to feel any of these things.

vii

The new novel, Grey Wethers, taking its name from those ancient sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story, traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s Heritage, but is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....

“What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss Sackville-West’s story of The Heir. “What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your heart leaps.

Books by V. Sackville-West

Sources on V. Sackville-West