Letters from the Cape

IF Lady Duff Gordon’s ‘Letters from the Cape’ are less familiar to the present generation of readers than those of the Lady Anne Barnard, the neglect is due in great part to the circumstances of their publication. After appearing in a now-forgotten miscellany of Victorian travel, Galton’s Vacation Tourists, third series (1864), where their simplicity and delicate unprofessional candour gave them a brief hour of public esteem, they were first issued separately as a supplement to Lady Duff Gordon’s Last Letters from Egypt, occupying the latter portion of a volume to which the writer’s daughter, Mrs. Ross, contributed a short but vivid memoir, which touched but lightly on her South African experiences; and they have never appeared, we believe, in any other form. Yet they are inferior in nothing but political interest to those of the authoress of ‘Auld Robin Gray’. Indeed, in her intellectual equipment, her temperament, and her gift of style, Lady Duff Gordon was a far rarer creature than the jovial and managing Scotswoman who was the correspondent of Dundas. And in human sympathy—the quality that has kept Lady Anne Barnard’s letters alive—Lady Duff Gordon shows a still wider range and a yet keener sensibility. Her letters are the fine flower of the English epistolary literature of the Cape. Few books of their class have better deserved reprinting.

The daughter of John and Sarah Austin ran every risk of growing up a blue-stocking. Yet she escaped every danger of the kind—the proximity of Bentham, her childish friendships with Henry Reeve and the Mills, and the formidable presence of the learned friends of both her parents—by the force of a triumphant naturalness and humour which remained with her to the end of her life. Although her schooling was in Germany and her sympathy with German character was remarkable, her own personality was rather French in its grace and gaiety. It was characteristic of her, then, to defend as she did ‘la vieille gaieté française’ against Heine on his death-bed. But the truth is that her sympathies were nearly perfect. She was one of those rare characters that see the best in every nationality without aping cosmopolitanism, simply because they are content everywhere to be human. Convention and prejudice vex them as little as pedantry can. Their clear eyes look out each morning on a fresh world, and their experiences are a perpetual school of sympathy and never the sad routine of disillusionment.

When Lady Duff Gordon came to the Cape in search of health in 1861, she brought with her, young though she was, a wealth of recollection and experience such as perhaps no other observer of South Africa has known. She had been the friend of nearly every prominent man-of-letters from Rogers to Tennyson. She was intimate with half the intellectual world of England and Germany, and admired for her beauty and grace of character in the salons of Paris as much as in the drawing-rooms of London. And she had shown the quality of her womanly sympathy in the most famous of her literary friendships, that with Heinrich Heine, when she visited the poet and soothed him in his last sad days in Paris—an episode perhaps better known to present-day readers from Mr. Zangwill’s story of A Mattrass Grave than in the moving narrative of Lady Duff Gordon herself, on which the story is based.