I enjoy nothing more completely than hearing David Cecil and Arthur Ponsonby talking together. It is like hearing an eighteenth-century Whig conversing with a product of post-war Oxford. Arthur’s Whiggism is coloured with Socialism, as the Whiggism of Charles James Fox was affected by the French Revolution; while David Cecil’s opinions are Conservative. But they don’t talk politics here: they talk instead of life and of letters. It might be the historian of Melbourne talking with Melbourne himself. Arthur and David are of different generations, yet they both seem to belong to the age in which people had time, not only to toy with all kinds of knowledge, but to assimilate their knowledge before they began toying with it. These two men share a hundred interests, but each has his own manner of approaching them—Arthur with wit and wisdom, and David with lightness and learning.
Osbert Sitwell not only looks, but is a character from the circle of Horace Walpole. More than anyone to-day he succeeds in converting the lightest conversation into a polished formal art. He never dominates a conversation, but he controls it. Much of the best talk to-day is rather like colts gamboling freely in a field; but when Osbert is there he harnesses the tricksome little creatures, takes the reins and drives the team. He decides the lines which the talk is going to follow, though no one seems to be aware that he has done so: then, although he leads the conversation, he brings everybody else into it just at the right moment. So after an evening with Osbert one can often remember the whole form of the conversation, how it began, developed, and ended. Osbert is also a master of the art of the Conte, using the word in what must have been its original sense—a tiny polished gem-like anecdote, made to be spoken and not to be written down. He achieves this perfectly himself, and he is also most appreciative of other people’s successes in this genre. He always remembers other people’s good stories, and afterwards will deftly seize the apt moment in another conversation to call upon the teller to fit it in again.
Siegfried Sassoon is a wayward and capricious talker, and if he finds himself among uncongenial people he often won’t talk at all, but sits apart in the spirit of his own line:
‘I have sat silent, angry at what they uttered’.
Siegfried is by turns violently intolerant, sympathetically appreciative, and savagely satirical. I suppose that everyone talks best in an intimate circle of friends, but this applies to Siegfried more than to anyone I know. When he does wake up and begin to talk, his conversation is very racy and amusing. He makes fun of himself as well as of other people and his descriptive powers are quite astonishing. Siegfried is the best of friends.
One often reads of a richly stored mind, but one does not so often come across it. G. M. Young is an encyclopædia, but it is an encyclopædia which might have been compiled and written by de la Rochefoucauld. He not only seems to know all about everything, but that knowledge of his is all on the tip of his extremely witty tongue. He has a quiet presence and his mass of information never streams forth in monologue form. He takes no larger share in a conversation than anyone else; and yet at the end of the evening, one finds that it is he who has brought to it all its real substance and matter, its out-of-the-way bits of information and an intimate acquaintance, not only with the important events of history, but with many historical characters who have for centuries been forgotten by everyone else. Talk is always worth while when G. M. Young is there, and his least observation is barbed with wit.
Ottoline Morrell’s personality is sybilline. When she talks, all that she says comes across with an added quality given by her beautiful figure, her noble features, her sombre eyes, and her deep emotional voice. She reads aloud very well, and some of the best talks with her which I remember have sprung up round about her reading of something or another. Ottoline has no superficial acquaintances. She is only interested in people whom she knows really well, and then she talks about them with wit and profundity, with sympathy and sometimes with bitterness. One evening at the Daye House, Ottoline read us a little study that she had written of Katherine Mansfield. She set her before us completely—body, soul and spirit. It seemed as if a little ghost-like figure had been created and was standing in the room; and at the moment when this impression was complete, all the lights suddenly went out. Her husband took a candle and held it to Ottoline’s manuscript, and then she read on in the darkened room, the candlelight playing on her face till she too looked like a ghost, and her voice came from some remote distance. That is the kind of happy accident which Ottoline seems to call up wherever she is. She creates her own setting and speaks out of it.
Chapter Nineteen
SIGHTSEEING
I learnt the love of sightseeing from my father. By the time I knew him, it was the chief, if not the only, sport which he continued to practise. By then, he no longer walked up partridges, so instead he walked up churches; and, as ever, he preferred the chase to the battue. Indeed sightseeing itself he found less enjoyable than the process of reaching the sight to be seen; and the organization of our excursions meant an immense amount of preliminary staff work. The facile sightseer of to-day has no notion of
