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.

It was into the little world of Caledon and Simonstown and Worcester, drowsy, sun-steeped villages of the old colony—for Cape Town had little attraction for her and the climate proved unsuitable—that this rare and exquisite being descended. But the test of the true letter-writer, the letter-writer of genius, is the skill and ease with which he brings variety out of seeming monotony. The letters of Lady Duff Gordon answer this test. She had not been many days in the country before she had discovered (if she required to discover) the excellent principle: ‘Avoid engelsche hoogmoedigheid in dealing with the Dutch’; and by the time she reaches Caledon she is on the best of terms with her new friends. ‘The postmaster, Heer Klein, and his old Pylades, Heer Ley, are great cronies of mine’—she writes—‘stout old grey-beards, toddling down the hill together. I sometimes go and sit on the stoep with the two old bachelors and they take it as a great compliment; and Heer Klein gave me my letters all decked with flowers, and wished “vrolyke tydings, Mevrouw”, most heartily.’ She has a keen eye for the fine shades of national character, and the modifications that spring from differences of upbringing: the English farmer, ‘educated in Belgium’, the young Dutch doctor with English manners, the German basket-maker’s wife in Cape Town. A whole chapter might be written on her friendship with the Malays, whose hearts she won as completely as she afterwards did those of their Mohammedan brothers in Egypt. Mr. Ian Colvin has since opened up afresh the field she was here almost the first to survey. In another direction, in her remarks on the Eastern Province Jew of 1860, Lady Duff Gordon has given us some notes which are of distinct value for social history. The following passage, for example, deserves to be quoted as a ‘point de repÈre’ in the evolution of a type. ‘These Colonial Jews’—says the writer—‘are a new Erscheinung to me. They have the features of their race, but many of their peculiarities are gone. Mr. L—, who is very handsome and gentlemanly, eats ham and patronises a good breed of pigs on the “model farm” on which he spends his money. He is (he says) a thorough Jew in faith, and evidently in charitable works; but he wants to say his prayers in English and not to “dress himself up” in a veil and phylacteries for the purpose; and he and his wife talk of England as “home”, and care as much for Jerusalem as their neighbours. They have not forgotten the old persecutions, and are civil to the coloured people, and speak of them in quite a different tone from other English colonists. Moreover, they are far better mannered and more ‘human’, in the German sense of the word, in all respects; in short, less “colonial”.’ It was a lady of this party who described Prince Albert’s funeral to Lady Duff Gordon. ‘The people mourned for him’—she said—‘as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better.’

There is not much attempt to describe scenery in Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters, but just enough to show that her eye was as sensitive to landscape as to the shades of racial character and feeling. She indicates delicately yet effectively the difference between the atmosphere at the coast and that inland. ‘It is the difference between a pretty pompadour beauty and a Greek statue. Those pale opal mountains as distinct in every detail as the map on your table and so cheerful and serene; no melodramatic effects of clouds and gloom.’ But, as a rule, it is the human pageant that engrosses her, and here her sense of values is extraordinarily keen. There is no better instance than the portrait of the German basket-maker’s wife, who confided to the writer her timidity on landing in Africa. ‘I had never—she said—been out of the city of Berlin and knew nothing.’ She spoke of the natives as well-bred (anstÄndig), and Lady Duff Gordon’s comment is: ‘The use of the word was characteristic. She could recognize an AnstÄndigkeit not of Berlin.’ But one might quote from every second page of these letters. Lady Duff Gordon was less than a year in South Africa; but in that time she brought more happiness to those around her than many have done in a lifetime. And her bounties live after her.

A last remark may not be out of place here, although it will doubtless occur to every reader who approaches these letters with sympathy and discretion. They must be read as true letters and the spontaneous delineation of a personality, and not as a considered contribution to South African history. Freer even than Stevenson himself from ‘le romantisme des poitrinaires’, and singularly clear-sighted in all that comes under her personal observation, Lady Duff Gordon does not wholly escape the nemesis which overtakes the traveller who accepts his history from hearsay. And in South Africa, as we know, such nemesis is well-nigh unfailing. Few, however, have been the travellers, as the following pages will show, who could meet such a charge with so great evidence of candour, disinterestedness, and love of human nature in its simplest and most innocent forms.

J. P.