Memoirs of Life and Literature
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Title: Memoirs of Life and Literature
Author: W. H. Mallock
Release date: January 1, 2010 [eBook #30823]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE ***
Produced by Peter Vachuska, Malcolm Farmer, Susan Skinner
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
MEMOIRS OF LIFE
AND LITERATURE
[Illustration]
Books by W. H. MALLOCK
Memoirs of Life and Literature
The Limits of Pure Democracy _5th Edition_
Religion as a Credible Doctrine
The Reconstruction of Belief
_Novels_
The Individualist _3rd Edition_
The Heart of Life _3rd Edition_
A Human Document _9th Edition_
[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE]
MEMOIRS OF
LIFE AND LITERATURE
BY
W. H. MALLOCK
AUTHOR OF
"RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXX
MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1920
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
FAMILY ANTECEDENTS 1
The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A
Child's Outlook on Life
CHAPTER II
THE TWO NATIONS 20
The Rural Poor of Devonshire--The Old Landed Families--An
Ecclesiastical Magnate
CHAPTER III
A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE 9
Early Youth Under a Private Tutor--Poetry--Premonitions of
Modern Liberalism
CHAPTER IV
WINTER SOCIETY AT TORQUAY 53
Early Acquaintance with Society--Byron's Grandson, Lord
Houghton--A Dandy of the Old School, Carlyle--Lord Lytton, and
Others--Memorable Ladies
CHAPTER V
EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD 68
Early Youth at Oxford--Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne,
and Ruskin--Dissipations of an Undergraduate--The Ferment of
Intellectual Revolution--_The New Republic_
CHAPTER VI
THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY 92
Early Experiences of London Society--Society Thirty Years Ago
Relatively Small--Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in
Small Societies Only
CHAPTER VII
VIGNETTES OF LONDON LIFE 113
Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son--The World of Balls--The
"Great Houses," and Their New Rivals--The Latter Criticized by
Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse--Types of More Serious
Society--Lady Marian Alford and Others--_Salons_ Exclusive and
Inclusive--A Clash of Two Rival Poets--The Poet
Laureate--Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life--Dean
Stanley--Whyte Melville--"Ouida"--"Violet Fane"--Catholic
Society--Lord Bute--Banquet to Cardinal Manning--Difficulties of
the Memoir-writer--Lord Wemyss and Lady P---- --Indiscretions of
Augustus Hare--Routine of a London Day--The Author's Life Out of
London
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIETY IN COUNTRY HOUSES 142
A Few Country Houses of Various Types--Castles and Manor Houses
from Cornwall to Sutherland
CHAPTER IX
FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS 168
First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to
the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch
Constituency
CHAPTER X
A FIVE MONTHS' INTERLUDE 194
A Venture on the Riviera--Monte Carlo--Life in a Villa at
Beaulieu--A Gambler's Suicide--A Gambler's Funeral
CHAPTER XI
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGES" 209
Intellectual Apathy of Conservatives--A Novel Which Attempts to
Harmonize Socialist Principles with Conservative
CHAPTER XII
CYPRUS, FLORENCE, HUNGARY 226
A Winter in Cyprus--Florence--Siena--Italian
Castles--Cannes--Some Foreign Royalties--Visit During the
Following Spring to Princess Batthyany in Hungary
CHAPTER XIII
TWO WORKS ON SOCIAL POLITICS 255
The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth--"Ouida"--Conservative
Torpor as to Social Politics--Two Books: _Labor and the Popular
Welfare_ and _Aristocracy and Evolution_--Letters from Herbert
Spencer
CHAPTER XIV
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION 270
The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Document_, _The Heart of
Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of
Religion: _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, _The Veil of the
Temple_, _The Reconstruction of Belief_--Passages from _The Veil
of the Temple_
CHAPTER XV
_From the Highlands to New York_ 292
Summer on the Borders of Caithness--A Two Months' Yachting
Cruise--The Orkneys and the Outer Hebrides--An Unexpected
Political Summons
CHAPTER XVI
POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA 308
Addresses on Socialism--Arrangements for Their
Delivery--American Society in Long Island and New
York--Harvard--Prof. William James--President
Roosevelt--Chicago--Second Stay in New York--New York to
Brittany--_A Critical Examination of Socialism_--Propaganda in
England
CHAPTER XVII
THE AUTHOR'S WORKS SUMMARIZED 335
A Boy's Conservatism--Poetic Ambitions--The Philosophy of
Religious Belief--The Philosophy of Industrial
Conservatism--Intellectual Torpor of Conservatives--Final
Treatises and Fiction
CHAPTER XVIII
LITERATURE AND ACTION 343
Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not
Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose as
a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in
Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great Which
Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of
Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_
INDEX 373
ILLUSTRATIONS
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE _Frontispiece_
ROBERT BROWNING _Facing p. 30_
THOMAS CARLYLE " 64
JOHN RUSKIN " 86
OUIDA " 126
CARDINAL MANNING " 134
HERBERT SPENCER " 266
THEODORE ROOSEVELT " 318
MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
FAMILY ANTECEDENTS
The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A
Child's Outlook on Life
"Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very
various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's _Confessions_ to the gossip
of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family
likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a
personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs
that the present book belongs.
But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes
represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is
conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances,
general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts;
and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning
and unity which have their origin in the age--in the general conditions
and movements which his personal recollections cover--rather than in
any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus
if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself--namely, to examine
or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems
of life--social, philosophical, religious, and economic--as have in turn
engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of
his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a
personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of
one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.
Now for all reflecting persons whose childhood reaches back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, the most remarkable feature of the
period which constitutes the age for themselves cannot fail to be a
sequence of remarkable and momentous changes--changes alike in the
domains of science, religion, and society; and if any one of such
persons should be asked, "Changes from what?" his answer will be, if he
knows how to express himself, "Changes from the things presented to him
by his first remembered experiences, and by him taken for granted," such
as the teaching, religious or otherwise, received by him, and the
general constitution of society as revealed to him by his own
observation and the ways and conversation of his elders. These are the
things which provide the child's life with its starting point, and these
are determined by the facts of family tradition and parentage. It is,
therefore, with a description of such family facts that the author of a
memoir like the present ought properly to begin.
The Mallocks, who have for nearly three hundred years been settled at
Cockington Court, near to what is now Torquay, descend from a William
Malet, Mallek, or Mallacke, who was, about the year 1400, possessed of
estates lying between Lyme and Axmouth. This individual, according to
the genealogists of the Heralds' College, was a younger son of Sir
Baldwyn Malet of Enmore, in the county of Dorset. His descendants, at
all events, from this time onward became connected by marriage with such
well-known West Country families as the Pynes, the Drakes, the
Churchills, the Yonges of Colyton, the Willoughbys of Payhembury, the
Trevelyans, the Tuckfields (subsequently Hippesleys), the Strodes of
Newnham, the Aclands, the Champernownes, and the Bullers. Between the
reigns of Henry VII and Elizabeth they provided successive Parliaments
with members for Lyme and Poole. One of them, Roger, during the reign of
the latter sovereign, found his way to Exeter, where, as a banker or
"goldsmith," he laid the foundations of what was then a very great
fortune, and built himself a large town house, of which one room is
still intact, with the queen's arms and his own juxtaposed on the
paneling. The fortune accumulated by him was, during the next two
reigns, notably increased by a second Roger, his son, in partnership
with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, military governor of Plymouth, who had
somehow become possessed of immense territories in Maine, and was a
prominent figure in the history of English trade with America.
The second Roger, about the year 1640, purchased the Cockington property
from Sir Henry Cary, a Cavalier, who appears to have been a typical
sufferer from his devotion to the royal cause. Roger Mallock was,
indeed, so far Royalist himself that he entered a protest against the
execution of Charles; but both he and his relatives also were evidently
in sympathy otherwise with the Parliamentary party; for, during the
Protectorate, Elizabeth Mallock, his cousin, married Lord Blayney, an
Irishman, who was personally attached to Cromwell; while Rawlin Mallock,
this second Roger's son (who had married Susannah, Sir Ferdinando
Gorges's daughter), was Whig member for Totnes, twice Whig member for
Ashburton, and was one of the small group of peers and country gentlemen
who welcomed William of Orange when he disembarked at Brixham. Rawlin's
heir was a boy--beautiful, as a picture of him in the guise of a little
Cavalier shows--who died a minor in the year 1699, but who, during his
brief life, as a contemporary chronicler mentions, had distinguished
himself by an accomplishment extremely rare among the young country
gentlemen of his own day--indeed, we may add of our own--that is to day,
a precocious knowledge of Hebrew.
The young scholar was succeeded by a third Rawlin, his cousin, a
personage of a very different type, who, in concert with his next-door
neighbor, Mr. Cary of Torre Abbey, added to the pursuits of a Squire
Western the enterprise of a smuggler in a big way of business. He was,
moreover, a patron of the turf, having a large stud farm on Dartmoor,
with results which would have been disastrous for himself if the wounds
inflicted by the world had not been healed through his connection with
the Established Church. He was fortunately the patron of no less than
sixteen livings, or cures of souls, by the gradual sale of most of which
he managed to meet, as a Christian should do, the claims of his lay
creditors. Of the bottles of port with which he stocked the Cockington
cellars two, bearing the date of 1745, still remain--or till lately
remained--unopened. Through the successor of this typical Georgian the
property passed to my grandfather, of whom my father was a younger son.
Like many other younger sons, my father, to use a pious phrase, suffered
himself to be "put into the Church," where two of the livings still
owned by his family awaited him. These, to his temporal advantage, he
presently exchanged for another. His health, however, since I can
remember him, never permitted him to exert himself in the performance of
divine service. Indeed, his ecclesiastical interests were architectural
rather than pastoral. He accordingly, after a brief acquaintance with
his new parishioners, committed them to the spiritual care of a
stalwart and well-born curate, and bought a picturesque retreat about
ten or twelve miles away, embowered in ivy, and overlooking the river
Exe, where he spent his time in enlarging the house and gardens, and in
planting slopes and terraces, about a quarter of a mile in length, with
what were then very rare trees. He was subsequently given for life the
use of another house, Denbury Manor, of which I shall speak presently,
which I myself much preferred, and with which my own early recollections
are much more closely associated.
My mother was a daughter of the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, and sister of
three distinguished brothers--Hurrell Froude, prominent as a leader of
the Tractarian movement, Antony Froude the historian, and William
Froude, who, though his name is less generally known, exercised, as will
be shown presently, an influence on public affairs greater than that of
many cabinet ministers. The Archdeacon of Totnes, their father, was a
Churchman of a type now extinct as the dodo. Born in the early part of
the reign of George III, and inheriting a considerable fortune, he was
in his youth addicted to pursuits a proficiency in which is now regarded
by no one as absolutely essential to a fitness for Holy Orders. He was
famous for his horses, and also for his feats of horsemanship, one of
these being the jumping of a five-barred gate without losing either of
two guinea pieces which were placed at starting between his knees and
the saddle. To the accomplishments of an equestrian he added those of a
dilettante. He was an architect, a collector of pictures, a herald and
archaeologist, and also (as Ruskin declared, to whom some of his
drawings were exhibited) an artist whose genius was all but that of a
master. Like other young men of fortune, he made what was then called
the "grand tour of Europe," his sketchbooks showing that he traveled as
far as Corfu, and subsequently, when he settled for life as the vicar of
Dartington parish, he was regarded as one of the most enlightened
country gentlemen of the district, active in improving the roads, which,
till his time, were abominable, and in bringing poachers to punishment
if not to repentance.
Within a short walk of the parsonage, over the brow of a wooded hill, is
another house, which in the scenery of my childhood was an object no
less familiar--Dartington Hall, the home of the Champernowne family,
with which, by marriage and otherwise, my father's was very closely
connected. Yet another house--it has been mentioned already as
associated with my childhood also--is Denbury Manor, with its stucco
chimneys and pinnacles, its distance from Dartington being something
like eight miles. These four houses--Denbury Manor, Dartington
Parsonage, Dartington Hall, and Cockington Court--all lying within a
circle of some twelve miles in diameter, represent, together with their
adjuncts, the material aspects of the life with which I was first
familiar. Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.
Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and
enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was
occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old
Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth
by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging _ingénue_; but when
I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty. She was, indeed, when she
died very nearly a hundred, and her house and its surroundings now
figure in my recollections as things of the eighteenth century which,
preserved in all their freshness, had hardly been touched by the years
which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable
antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or
Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was
backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one
side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens
with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the
form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since
the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there
were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female
villagers would be raking the gravel paths and turning them into
weedless silver. The front door, heavy with nails, would be opened by
an aged footman, his cheeks pink like an apple, and his white silk
stockings and his livery always faultless. Within were old Turkey
carpets, glossy, but not worn with use, heavy Chippendale chairs, great
Delf jugs with the monogram of George II on them, a profusion of
Oriental china, and endless bowls of potpourri. On the shelves of
whatnots were books of long-forgotten eighteenth-century plays. In one
of the sitting rooms was a magnificent portrait by Reynolds of Miss
Froude's mother. It represented her playing on a guitar, and on a table
beneath it reposed the guitar itself. Here and there lay one of the
ivory hands with which powdered ladies once condescended to scratch
themselves. There were shining inkstands whose drawers were still
stocked with the wafers used for sealing letters in the days of Lydia
Languish. In another room, called "the little parlor," and commonly used
for breakfast, an old gentleman by Opie smiled from one of the walls,
and saw one thing only which he might have seen there in his boyhood--a
small piano by Broadwood, always fastidiously polished, as if it had
just come from the shop, and bearing the date of 1780. Many houses
abound in similar furnishings. The characteristic of Denbury was that it
contained nothing else. These things were there, not as survivals of the
past, but as parts of a past which for the inmates had never ceased to
be the present. They were there as the natural appurtenances of a lady
who, so far as I knew, had never been near a railway till a special
train was run to convey mourners to her funeral.
Miss Froude matched her surroundings. During her later years she was
never visible till midday, by which time she would, in an upstairs
drawing room, be found occupying a cushionless chair at a large central
table, with a glass of port at her right hand and a volume of sermons at
her left. On either side of her stood a faithful attendant, one being a
confidential maid, the other a Miss Drake--an old, mittened companion,
hardly younger in appearance than herself--both of whom watched her with
eyes of solicitous reverence, and seemed always ready to collapse into
quasi-religious curtsies. Here she would receive such visitors as
happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential
villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy.
Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having
been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself. Originally
a diminutive dwelling--a relic of medieval times--he enlarged it to the
dimensions of a substantial country house, surrounding a court, and
connected with a medley of outbuildings--servants' offices, stables,
barns, and coach houses, one of these last containing as a solitary
recluse a high-hung yellow chariot, lined with yellow morocco, in which
the Archdeacon had been wont to travel before the battle of Waterloo,
and in which his grandchildren were never weary of swinging themselves.
If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called
modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away
now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of
Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife
boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver
handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and
Sir Thomas Bertram. Opposite the dining room was a library, very
carefully kept, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides
great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were
collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II,
notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal
lover--works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must
have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of
Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing a bust of
Demosthenes. In the drawing-room were watercolor drawings by artists
such as Prout and Stansfield; a group of Dutch paintings, including a
fine Van Ostade; sofas, on which Miss Austen might, have sat by the
Prince Regent; and scrap-work screens on which faded portraits and
landscapes were half eclipsed by quotations from _Elegant Extracts_.
From the drawing-room windows, in my mother's earlier days, might often
have been seen the figure of an old head gardener and factotum, George
Diggins by name, bending over beds of geraniums, who was born in the
reign of George II, who had passed his youth as a charcoal burner in
woods not far from Ugbrooke, the seat of the Catholic Cliffords, and who
often recounted how, on mysterious nights, "four horses and a coach,
with the old Lord Clifford inside it, would come tumbling out of the
woods into the road like so many packs of wool."
Dartington Hall--very well known to architects as the work of John
Holland, Duke of Exeter, in the reign of Richard II--passed by exchange
to the Champernownes in the reign of Henry VIII, and was originally an
enormous structure, inclosing two quadrangles. A large part of it, as
may be seen from old engravings, was falling into ruins in the days of
George II, but its principal feature was intact till the beginning of
the nineteenth century. This was one of the finest baronial halls in
England, seventy feet by forty, with a roof resembling that of the great
hall at Westminster. The roof, however, at that time showing signs of
impending collapse, it was taken down by my grandfather in the year
1810, and only the bare walls and the pointed windows remain. The
inhabited portion, however, is still of considerable extent, one of its
frontages--two hundred and thirty feet in length--abutting so closely on
a churchyard that the dead need hardly turn in their graves to peer in
through the lower windows at faded wall-papers, bedroom doors, and
endless yards of carpet. The interior, as I remember it, did not differ
from that of many old country houses. There were one or two great rooms,
a multitude of family portraits, and landscapes, marbles and coins
brought from Italy by a traveled and dilettante ancestor. It was a great
rendezvous for numerous Buller relations. It was, as was the parsonage
also, a nest of old domestics, all born in the parish, and it included
among its other inmates a ghost, who was called "the Countess," and who
took from time to time alarming strolls along the passages.
It remains to add a word or two with regard to Cockington Court. At the
time when my father was born in it, it was the heart of a neighborhood
remotely and even primitively rural, and fifty years later, when I can
first remember it, its immediate surroundings were unchanged. A few
miles away the modern world had, indeed, begun to assert itself in the
multiplying villas of Torquay, but on the Cockington property, which
includes the district of Chelston, few dwellings existed which had not
been there in the days of Charles II. Torquay, which at the beginning of
the Napoleonic wars was nothing more than a cluster of fishermen's huts,
owed its rise to the presence of the British fleet in Torbay, and the
need of accommodation on shore for officers' wives and families. My
grandfather built two houses, Livermead House and Livermead Cottage, in
answer to this demand. Both were for personal friends, one of them
being the first Lord St. Vincent, the other being Sir John Colbourne,
afterward Lord Seaton. But though elaborate plans were subsequently put
before him for turning the surrounding slopes into a pretentious and
symmetrical watering place, the construction of no new residence was
permitted by himself or his successor till somewhere about the year
1865, when a building lease was granted by the latter to one of his own
connections.
Meanwhile, on adjacent properties, belonging to the Palks and Carys,
Torquay had been developing into what became for a time the most famous
and fashionable of the winter resorts of England, Cockington still
remaining a quiet and undisturbed Arcadia.
But the real or nominal progress of five-and-forty years has brought
about changes which my grandfather, blind to his own interests,
resisted. To-day, as the train, having passed the station of Torre,
proceeds toward that of Paignton, the traveler sees, looking inland at
the Cockington and Chelston slopes, a throng of villas intermixed with
the relics of ancient hedgerows. If, alighting at Torquay station, he
mounts the hill above it by what in my childhood was a brambled and
furtive lane, he will find on either side of him villas and villa
gardens, till at length he is brought to a ridge overlooking a secluded
valley. For some distance villas will still obscure his view, but
presently these end. Below him he will see steep fields descending into
a quiet hollow, the opposite slopes being covered or crowned with woods,
and against them he will see smoke wreaths straying upward from
undiscerned chimneys. A little farther on, the road, now wholly rural,
dips downward, and Cockington village reveals itself, not substantially
changed, with its thatch and its red mud walls, from what it had been
more than two hundred years ago. Its most prominent feature is the
blacksmith's forge, which, unaltered except for repairs, is of much
greater antiquity. It is said that, as a contrast between the old world
and the new, few scenes in England have been more often photographed
than this. Passing the blacksmith's forge, and mounting under the shade
of trees, the road leads to a lodge, the grounds of Cockington Court,
and the church which very nearly touches it.
The house as it now stands--a familiar object to tourists--is merely a
portion of what once was a larger structure. It was partly built by the
Carys in the year of the Spanish Armada. Roger Mallock reconstructed it
some seventy years later. It formed in his days, and up to those of my
grandfather, one side of a square, entered between two towers, and was
surrounded by a deer park of four or five hundred acres. Toward the end
of the eighteenth century, however, agricultural land then rising in
value, my grandfather, who threw away one fortune by refusing to have a
town on his property, had been shrewd enough to get rid of his deer,
and turned most of his parkland into farms. He also destroyed the
forecourt of his house and a range of antique offices, considerably
reducing at the same time the size of the main building by depriving it
of its top story and substituting a dwarfish parapet for what had once
been its eight gables. The interior suffered at his hands to an even
greater extent. A hall with a minstrels' gallery was turned by him into
several rooms as commonplace as it is possible to imagine. Indeed little
of special interest survived him but some fine Italian ceilings, the
most curious of which exists no longer, a paneled dining-room of the
reign of William and Mary, a number of portraits dating from the days of
James I onward, and a wall paper representing life-size savages under
palm trees, which was part of the plunder of a French vessel during the
time of the Napoleonic wars. To this meager list, however, up to my
father's time might have been added another item of a more eloquent and
more unusual kind--namely, a gilded coach, in which, according to
village tradition, an old Madam Mallock (as she was called) used to be
dragged by six horses along the execrable lanes of the neighborhood for
her daily airing in the early part of the reign of George III. It is a
great pity that, of all the appliances of life, carriages are those
which are least frequently preserved. The reason doubtless is that they
take up a good deal of room, and become absurdly old-fashioned long
before they become interesting. The old coach of which I speak was
bequeathed, with other heirlooms, to my father, who, I may say without
filial impiety, proved altogether unworthy of it. He left it in a shed
near a pond, into which it subsequently fell, its _disjecta membra_
being presumably at the bottom still.
But whatever the house may have lost in the way of hereditary contents,
the church contained, in my childhood, other symbols of the past--they
have now likewise vanished--which spoke of "the family" rather than the
mysteries of the Christian faith. The family shrouded its devotions, and
sometimes its slumbers, in a pew which was furnished with a large
fireplace, and eclipsed with its towering walls something like half the
altar. All the panels of the western gallery were emblazoned with coats
of arms and quarterings, and all the available wall space was dark with
family hatchments. One afternoon, some five-and-forty years ago, a
daughter of the house, who happened to be alone indoors, was alarmed by
a summons to show herself and receive the Queen of Holland, who was then
staying at Torquay, and who wished to inspect an old English house and
its appurtenances. My cousin, who took her into the church, and who was
somewhat confused by the presence of so august a visitor, explained the
hatchments, with regard to which the queen questioned her, by saying
that one was put up whenever a member of the Mallock family married.
As for myself, these solemn heraldic objects vaguely imbued me with a
sense, of which I took long in divesting myself, that my own family was
one of the most important and permanent institutions of the country.
They were otherwise associated in my memory with a long succession of
Christmases, when holly berries enlivened their frames and peeped over
the walls of the pew where my elders drowsed, and my coevals were
sustained during the sermon by visions of the plum pudding and crackers
which would reward them in a near hereafter. I can still remember how,
before these joys began, we would group ourselves in the dining-room
windows, peering at distant woods, in which keepers still set man traps,
or watching the village schoolchildren on their way from church
homeward, making with their crimson cloaks a streak of color as they
followed one another across slopes of snow.
The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle
resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldries which thronged
the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses of which I have
just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not visually, the same.
They all looked out, as though it were the unquestioned order of things,
on wooded seclusions pricked by manorial chimneys or on lodges and gray
park walls, while somewhere beyond these last lurked the thatch of
contented cottages, at the doors of which, when a member of "the family"
passed, women and children would curtsy and men touch their forelocks.
Here some persons may be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect
which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory.
They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to
the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of
their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery
to which history shows few parallels. Such an objection, even if
correct, would, however, be here irrelevant; for I am dealing now not
with things as they actually were, but merely with the impressions
produced by them on childish minds, and more particularly on my own.
Nevertheless, the objection in itself is of quite sufficient importance
to call, even here, for some incidental attention; and how far, in this
respect, our impressions were true or false will appear in the following
chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE TWO NATIONS
The Rural Poor of Devonshire--The Old Landed Families--An
Ecclesiastical Magnate
Our impressions of the cottagers, to which I have just alluded--and for
us the cottagers represented the people of England generally--were not,
it is true, derived from our own scientific investigations; they were
derived from the conversation of our elders. But the knowledge which
these elders possessed as to the ways, the temper, and the conditions of
the rural poor was intimate, and was constantly illustrated by
anecdotes, to which we as children were never weary of listening. The
descriptions so often given of the misery of the agricultural laborers
and the oppression of the ruling class from the beginning of the
nineteenth century up to the abolition of the Corn Laws may be correct
as applied to certain parts of the kingdom; but, in the case of
Devonshire at all events, they are, it would appear, very far from the
truth. The period more particularly in question, including the decade
known as "the hungry 'forties," is precisely the period with which these
elders of ours were most closely acquainted; and, though we occasionally
heard of disturbances called "bread riots" as having occurred in Exeter
and Plymouth, no hint reached us of such outbreaks having ever taken
place in the country, or of any distress or temper which was calculated
to provoke protests of any sort or kind against the established order.
On the contrary, between the rural poor and the old-fashioned landed
aristocracy, lay and clerical alike, the relations were not only
amicable, but very often confidential also.
This fact may be illustrated by the case of old Miss Froude, the "Lady
Bountiful" of her immediate neighborhood, who was constantly appealed to
by its inhabitants, not only for material aid, but for religious
guidance as well, and appreciation of their religious experiences. Thus
on one occasion an old woman was ushered into Miss Froude's presence who
had evidently some fact of great importance to communicate. The fact
turned out to be this: that she had spent the whole of the previous
night in a trance, during which she had ascended to heaven, and been let
in by "a angel." "Well," said Miss Froude, "and did they ask you your
name?" "No, ma'am, not my name," was the answer; "they only asked me my
parish." "And do you," Miss Froude continued, "remember what the angel's
name was?" The old woman seemed doubtful. "Do you think," said Miss
Froude, "it was Gabriel?" "Iss, fay (yes, i' faith)," said the old
woman. "Sure enough 'twas Gaburl." "And did you," said Miss Froude,
finally, "see anybody in heaven whom you knew?" The old woman hesitated,
but caught herself up in time, and solemnly said, "I seed you, ma'am."
Had all Miss Froude's dependents been of an equally communicative
disposition, there would indeed in the confessions of two of them have
been matter of a less peaceful character. It had for some time been
whispered among her indoor servants--this is before I can remember--that
horses, after days of idleness so far as carriage work was concerned,
would on certain mornings be found covered with sweat, and other signs
of mysteriously hard usage. It was ultimately found out that an
enterprising coachman and groom had been riding them periodically to
Teignmouth, and playing a nocturnal part in the landing of smuggled
cargoes, these being stowed in the cellars of a decaying villa, which
for years had remained tenantless owing to persistent rumors that it was
haunted by a regiment of exceedingly savage ghosts. The only other
approach to anything like rural violence which reached our ears through
the channel of oral tradition was an event which must have occurred
about the year 1830, and was reported to the Archdeacon by George
Diggins, his old factotum. This was the plunder of a vessel which had
been wrecked the night before somewhere between Plymouth and Salcombe.
The Archdeacon asked if no authorities had interfered. "I heard, sir,"
said George Diggins, "that a revenue officer did what he could to stop
'un, but they hadn't a sarved he very genteel." This statement meant
that they had pushed him over the cliffs.
Otherwise the stories of rural life that reached me, though relating to
times which have in popular oratory been associated with the
rick-burnings and kindred outrages "by which the wronged peasant righted
himself," were pictures of a general content, broken only by individual
vicissitudes, which were accepted and bewailed as part of the common
order of nature. Of such individual afflictions the larger part were
medical. The women, even the most robust, would rarely confess to the
enjoyment of anything so uninteresting as a condition of rude health.
The usual reply made by them to the inquiries of any lady visitant was,
"Thankee, ma'am, I be torrable" (tolerable); but, if conscious of any
definite malady, their diagnosis of their own cases would, though
simple, be more precise. One of them told my mother that for days she'd
been terrible bad. "My inside," she said, "be always a-coming up, though
I've swallowed a pint of shot by this time merely to keep my liver
down."
In cottage households, though occasionally there might be some shortage
of food, there were no indications of anything like general or chronic
want. Indeed, if delicacies which the inmates had never seen before were
brought them as a present from this or from that "great house," they
would often eye them askance, and make a favor of taking them. That the
ordinary diet of the Devonshire cottagers of those days contented them
is shown by the dinner prepared for a man who worked at a limekiln by
his wife, which she complacently exhibited to my mother as at once
appetizing and nutritious. It was a species of dumpling with an onion,
instead of an apple, in the middle of it, the place of the customary
crust being taken by home-baked bread.
On the whole, however, the cottagers, no less than their richer
neighbors, were preoccupied by interests other than those of mere
domestic economy. Their gossip would accordingly take a wider range, as
when one of them announced to an aunt of mine that a son and a daughter
who had emigrated to the United States had "got stuck in the mud just
outside America."
Often their discourses would relate to domestic discipline and theology.
There was a certain Mrs. Pawley whose dwelling was widely celebrated as
the scene of almost constant strife between herself and her husband, and
who, on being asked by one of her lady patronesses if she could not do
something to make matters run more smoothly, replied: "That's just what
I tries to do, ma'am. I labor for peace, but when I speak to he thereof,
he makes hisself ready for battle direckly."
Another good woman again had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty
act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was
explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that
she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," on
which a neighbor, who had no need for repentance, promptly appeared on
the scene and said to her: "My dear crachur (creature), why be you
temp'ed to do sich thing? I be never temp'ed to do nothing but what's
good."
Passing one day through an orchard, Mr. Froude the historian encountered
a man who was contemplating a heap of apples. The man looked up as
though about to speak of the crop, but instead of doing so he gave vent
to the following reflection: "Pretty job, sir," he said, "there was
about a apple one time. Now the De-vine, He might have prevented that if
He'd had a mind to. But com', sir, 'tis a mystery:"
Moral theology would sometimes take a more skeptical turn. A certain Mr.
Edwardes--a most amusing man--used to describe a call which he paid one
Sunday afternoon to a farmer near Buckfastleigh, whom he found reading
his Bible. Mr. Edwardes congratulated him on the appropriate nature of
his studies. The farmer pushed the book aside, and, pointing to the open
pages, which were those containing the account of the fall of Jericho,
said: "Do 'ee believe that, sir? Well--I don't." Mr. Edwardes, with
becoming piety, observed that we were bound to believe whatever the
Scriptures told us. "Well," the farmer continued, "when I was a boy they
used to bake here in the town oven, and whenever the oven was heated,
they sounded a sheep's horn. Some of the boys Sundays would get hold of
that horn, just for the fun of the thing, and blaw it for all it was
worth. If that there story was true, there wouldn't be a house in
Buckfastleigh standing."
Independent, if not skeptical, thought was represented even by one of
the members of Archdeacon Froude's own domestic establishment--a house
carpenter, who was a kind of uncanonical prophet. He would see in the
meadows visions of light and fire like Ezekiel's, and convert his
commonest actions into means of edification. On one occasion, when he
was constructing a bedroom cupboard, a daughter of the house remarked,
as she paused to watch him, "Well, John, that cupboard is big enough."
"It," said the prophet, reflectively, "is immense, but yet confined. I
know of something which is immense, but not confined." On being asked
what this was he answered, "The love of God."
Yet another story told by Mr. Antony Froude illustrates rural mentality
in relation to contemporary politics. Mr. Froude was the tenant of a
well-known house in Devonshire, and had come to be on very friendly
terms with Mr. Emmot, his landlord's agent, a typical and true Devonian.
One day Mr. Emmot came to him in a condition of some perplexity. He had
been asked an important question, and was anxious to know if the answer
he had given to it was satisfactory. It appeared that a cottager who had
a bit of land of his own had been saying to him, "Look here, Mr. Emmot:
can you tell us rightly what the difference be between a Conservative
and a Radical?" "Well, Mr. Froude," said Mr. Emmot, "I didn't rightly
knaw the philosophy of the thing, so I just said to 'un this: 'You knaw
me; well, I be a Conservative. You knaw Jack Radford--biggest blackguard
in the parish--well, he be a Radical. Now you knaw.'"
Chance reminiscences such as those which have just been quoted will be
sufficient to indicate what, so far as a child could understand them,
the conditions and ways of thinking of the rural population were, and
how easy and unquestioning were the relations which then subsisted
between it and the old landed families. These relations were easy,
because the differences between the two classes were commonly assumed to
be static, one supporting and one protecting the other, as though they
resembled two geological strata. In slightly different language, society
was presented to us in the form of two immemorial orders--the men,
women, and children who touched their hats and curtsied, and the men,
women, and children to whom these salutations were made.
I am not, however--let me say it again--attempting to write a chapter of
English history, or to give a precise description of facts as they
actually were so much as to depict the impressions which facts, such as
they were, produced on children like myself through the medium of
personal circumstances. At the same time, in the formation of these
impressions we were far from being left to our own unaided
intelligence. Our impressions, as just depicted, were sedulously
confirmed and developed by carefully chosen governesses. One of these,
young as she was, was a really remarkable woman, for whom English
history had hatched itself into something like a philosophy. Her
philosophy had two bases, one being the postulate of the divine right of
kings, the other being her interpretation of the victory of the Normans
over the Anglo-Saxons. Charles I she presented to our imaginations as a
martyr; and, what was still more important, she seriously taught us that
the population of modern England was still divided, so far as race is
concerned, precisely as it was at the time of the completion of the
Domesday Book; that the peers and the landed gentry were more or less
pure-blooded Normans, and the mass of the people Saxons; that the
principal pleasure of the latter was to eat to repletion; that their
duty was to work for, that their privilege was to be patronized by,
Norman overlords and distinguished Norman Churchmen; and finally, that
of this Norman minority we ourselves were distinguished specimens. All
this we swallowed, aided in doing so by books like _Woodstock_ and
_Ivanhoe_. But grotesque as such ideas seem now, they were not more
grotesque than those shadowed forth in some of the novels of Lord
Beaconsfield, and more particularly in _Sybil, or The Two Nations_. Had
we indeed been set to compose an essay on the social conditions, as we
ourselves understood them, "The Two Nations" would have been the title
which we could most appropriately have selected for it.
When, however, forgetting our general principles, we gave our attention
to the adult relations and connections who, through personal
acquaintance or otherwise, constituted for us what is commonly called
society, our respect for many of them as "Normans" was appreciably
tempered by a sense of their dullness as men and women. They were nearly
all of them members of old Devonshire families, beyond the circle of
which their interests did not often wander. But certain of them in my
own memory stand out from the rest as interesting types of conditions
which by this time have passed away. Of these I may mention four--Emma
and Antony Buller, son and daughter of Sir Antony Buller of Pound; Lord
Blatchford, a Gladstonian Liberal, and the celebrated Henry Philpotts,
the then Bishop of Exeter.
Antony Buller, who was my godfather, was vicar of a parish on the
western borders of Dartmoor. In the fact that "remote from towns he ran
his godly race" he resembled the vicar described in "The Deserted
Village," but except for his godliness he resembled him in little else.
A model of secluded piety, he was educated at Eton and Christchurch;
unquestioning in his social as well as his Christian conservatism, and
expressing in the refinement of his voice and the well-bred
quasi-meekness of his bearing a sense of family connection, tempered by
a scholarly recognition of the equality of human souls. Lord
Blatchford, his not very distant neighbor, was in many ways an Antony
Buller secularized. His piety, polished by the classics and Oxford
chapels, was what was in those days called Liberal, rather than Tory.
What in Antony Buller was a conservative Christian meekness was in Lord
Blatchford a progressive Christian briskness; but his belief in popular
progress was accompanied by a smile at its incidents, as though it were
a kind of frisking to which the masses ought to be welcome so long as it
did not assume too practical a character or endanger any of the palings
within the limits of which it ought to be confined.
[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING]
Emma Buller, too, was typical, but in a totally different way. She was a
type of that county life which railways have gradually modified, and by
this time almost obliterated. She was a woman remarkable for her
vivacity, wit, and humor. At county balls she was an institution. At
country houses throughout Devonshire and Cornwall she was a familiar and
welcome guest, and to half of her hosts and hostesses she was in one way
or another related. Among her accomplishments was the singing of comic
songs, in a beautifully clear but half-apologetic voice, so that while
gaining in point they lost all trace of vulgarity, her eyes seeming to
invite each listener on whom she fixed them to share with her some
amusement which was only half legitimate. At the Duke of Bedford's
house, near Tavistock, she exercised this magic one evening on Lord
John Russell. The song which she sang to him was political. It began
thus, each verse having the same recurring burden:
"Come, listen while I sing to you,
Lord John, that prince of sinisters,
Who once pulled down the House of Lords,
The Crown and all the ministers.
That is, he would have if he could,
But a little thing prevented him."
For many years she spent a large part of every winter with Lady (then
Miss) Burdett-Coutts, who had in those days a large villa at Torquay,
generally filled with visitors. Emma Buller's allusions to these, many
of whom were notabilities, enlarged, as I listened to them in my
childhood, my conception of the social world, and made it seem vaguely
livelier and more fruitful in adventure than the hereditary circle with
which alone I was so far familiar.
This result was accentuated by the stories told in my hearing of another
personage well known to my family likewise, to which I listened with a
yet keener appreciation. Bishop Philpotts--for it is of him I
speak--holding till the day of his death a "golden stall" at Durham, the
emoluments of which amounted to £5,000 a year, interested me rather as a
lay magnate than as a clerical. Among the many villas then rising at
Torquay the Bishop built one of the largest. This agreeable residence,
in the designing of which he was helped by my father, and which
overlooked extensive glades and lawns sloping down toward the sea,
enabled him to enjoy a society more entertaining than that of his own
cathedral close; and the anecdotes current in my family as to his ways
and his mundane hospitalities were as familiar to me as those of any
character in the novels of Miss Austen--a writer whose social
discrimination delighted and appealed to me before I was ten years old.
The Bishop was renowned for his suave and courtly manners, his charming
voice, and the subtle precision of its modulations; and the following
stories of him are still fresh in my memory.
At one of his luncheon parties he was specially kind to a country
clergyman's wife, who knew none of the company, and he took her out on a
terrace in order to show her the view--a view of the sea shut in by the
crags of a small cove. "Ah, my lord," gasped the lady, "it reminds one
so much of Switzerland." "Precisely," said the Bishop, "except that
there we have the mountains without the sea, and here we have the sea
without the mountains."
He was somewhat less urbane to an ultra-fashionable lady, his neighbor,
who had developed a habit, in his opinion objectionable, of exhibiting
his views to her visitors by way of passing the morning. This lady, with
a bevy of satellites, having appeared one day in his drawing room about
the hour of noon, the Bishop, with the utmost graciousness, took them
into a conservatory, showed them some of his plants and then, opening a
door, invited them to go outside. As soon as they were in the outer
air, he himself retreated, saying, as he closed the door, "We lunch at
one."
On another occasion at a dinner party a shy young lady was present,
whose mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang.
After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the
shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless
victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite
her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was
faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to
be a song. "Thank you," said the Bishop, benignly, as soon as the
performance was ended. "The next time you tell us you cannot sing we
shall know how to believe you."
On yet another occasion two intrepid females, armed with guidebooks, and
obviously determined to see whatever they could, had entered the
Bishop's carriage drive, and were considering which way they would take,
when their ears were caught by a sound like that of an opening window.
They discovered, on looking about them, that the drive was commanded by
a summerhouse, and, framed in an open window, was the visage of the
Bishop himself. "Ladies," he said, blandly, "these grounds are private,
as the gate through which you have just passed may in part have
suggested to you. The turn to the left will bring you in due time to the
stables. If you should go straight on you will presently reach the
house. Should you inspect the house, may I mention to you that in one of
the bedrooms is an invalid? You will perhaps pardon my servants if they
do not show you that. Good morning."
But my boyish appreciation of the Bishop's mundane qualities was equaled
by my faith in the sacrosanctity of his office. I never for a moment
doubted that men like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the
Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise
of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued
from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were
then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never
entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a
week four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and that
every word of the Bible was supernaturally dictated to the writer, were
to me facts as certain as the fact that the ear this globular or that
the date of the battle of Hastings was 1066. They belonged to the same
order of things as the "two nations"; and the attempts of certain
persons to discredit the former and to disturb the reciprocal relations
of the latter represented for me a mood so blasphemous and absurd as not
to be worthy of a serious man's attention.
And yet in certain ways by the time I was twelve years old I was
something of a revolutionary myself. Like the majority of healthy boys,
I had tastes for riding and shooting, and to such things as rooks and
rabbits my rifle was as formidable as most boys could desire. But long
before I was conscious of any passion for sport I found myself beset by
another, which was very much more insistent--namely, a passion for
literary composition--I cannot say a taste for writing, for I dictated
verses to the nursery-maids before I could hold a pen. As soon as I was
able to read I came across the works of Fielding, whose style I
endeavored to imitate in a series of lengthy novels, deriving as I did
so a precocious sense of manhood from the eighteenth-century oaths with
which I garnished the conversation of my characters. My ambitions,
however, as a writer of fiction were on the whole less constant than
those which I entertained as a poet. By governesses and other
instructors, Wordsworth and Tennyson were obtruded on me as models of
beauty and edification. Wordsworth I thought ridiculous. Tennyson seemed
to me unmanly and mawkish. The poets I found out for myself were Dryden
and, more particularly, Pope; and when I was about fourteen I imagined
myself destined to win back for Pope, as a model, the supremacy he had
unfortunately lost, while the sentimentalities of Tennyson and his
followers would disappear like the fripperies of faded and outworn
fashions.
When my father and his family migrated from the banks of the Exe to
Denbury these literary projects found fresh means of expanding
themselves. Opposite the front door of the Manor House was a large and
antique _annexe_, once occupied by a bailiff who managed the home farm.
This my grandfather had intended to connect with the main building, by
which means the Manor House would have been nearly doubled in size. His
scheme was not carried out. The _annexe_, covered with increasing
growths of ivy, remained locked up and isolated, and for many years
stood empty. But on the Archdeacon's death, and the removal of his
household from Dartington, a use was at last found for it. The upper
rooms were converted into a temporary storehouse for his library--large
rooms which now were lined with shelves, and in which fires were
frequently lighted to keep the volumes dry. In a moment of happy
inspiration I obtained permission to look after the fires myself. The
key was placed in my possession. Day by day I entered. I locked myself
in, and all the world was before me.
I had often before been irritated, and my curiosity had been continually
piqued, by finding that certain books--most of them plays of the time of
Charles II--would be taken away from me and secreted if I happened to
have abstracted some such stray volume from a bookcase; but here I was
my own master. My grandfather's library was, as I have said already,
particularly rich in literature of this semiforbidden class, and rows of
plays and poems by Congreve, Etheridge, Rochester, Dryden, and their
contemporaries offered themselves to my study, as though by some furtive
assignation. Among other wrecks of furniture with which the worm-eaten
floors were encumbered was an old and battered rocking-horse, bestriding
which I studied these secret volumes, and found in it an enchanted steed
which would lift me into the air and convey me to magically distant
kingdoms.
Inspired by these experiences, and fancying myself destined to
accomplish a counter-revolution in the literary taste of England, I
endeavored night by night to lay the foundations of my own poetic fame.
My bedroom was pungent with the atmosphere of a pre-Tennysonian world.
Its floor, uneven with age, was covered with a carpet whose patterns had
faded into a dim monochrome, and its walls were dark with portraits of
Copplestone forefathers in flowing wigs and satins. My bed was draped
with immemorial curtains, colored like gold and bordered with black
velvet. Close to the bed was a round mahogany table, furnished with pens
and paper, and night by night, propped up by pillows, I endeavored to
rival Dryden and Pope, by means of a quill wet with the dews of
Parnassus--dews which, having sprinkled the bedclothes, would scandalize
the housemaids the next morning by their unfortunate likeness to ink.
My father had originally meant to send me to Harrow, but, on the
recommendation of one of the sons of the Bishop of Exeter, he first
tried on me the effects of a school which had just been established for
the purpose of combining the ordinary course of education with an
inculcation of the extremest principles of the High Church Anglican
party. I was, however, deficient in one of the main characteristics on
which a boy's suitability to school life depends: I had an ingrained
dislike, not indeed of physical exercise, but of games. Football to me
seemed merely a tiresome madness, and cricket the same madness in a more
elaborate form. Instead, therefore, of promoting me to Harrow, where two
of his brothers had been educated, he took, after many delays, a step
for which I sincerely thanked him--he transferred me, by way of
preparation for Oxford, to the most congenial and delightful of all
possible private tutors, at whose house I spent the happiest years of my
life.
CHAPTER III
A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE
Early Youth Under a Private Tutor--Poetry--Premonitions of
Modern Liberalism
The tutor of whom I have spoken was the Rev. W. B. Philpot, a favorite
pupil of Doctor Arnold's at Rugby, an intimate friend of Tennyson's, and
himself a devotee of the Muses. His domed forehead was massive, his
features were delicately chiseled, and his eyes were a clear gray. His
back hair--the only hair he had got--showed a slight tendency to assume
picturesque and flowing curves on the collars of his well-made coats;
and, having heard from my father that I, too, was a poet, he declared
himself eager to welcome me, not only as a disciple, but also as a
valued friend. Mr. Philpot lived at Littlehampton, where he occupied a
most capacious house. It was the principal house in a very old-fashioned
terrace, which faced a sandy common, and enjoyed in those days an
uninterrupted view of miles of beach and the racing waves of the sea.
Mr. Philpot's disciples numbered from ten to twelve. They had, for the
most part, been removed from Harrow or Eton, by reason of no worse fault
than a signal inclination to indolence; and though, even under their
preceptor's genial and scholarly auspices, none of them except myself
showed much inclination for study, we formed together an agreeable and
harmonious party, much of its amenity being due to the presence of Mrs.
Philpot, his wife, whose brother, Professor Conington, was then the most
illustrious representative of Latin learning at Oxford.
We enjoyed, under Mr. Philpot's care, the amplest domestic comforts, and
we enjoyed, under our own care, almost unlimited credit at every shop in
the town. We had carriages, the hire of which went down in Mr. Philpot's
account, whenever we wanted them for expeditions; and we would often
drive out in the warm after-dinner twilights to a tea garden three miles
away, where we lingered among the scent of roses till the bell of some
remote church tower sounded, through the dewy quiet, its nine notes to
the stars. We had boats on the Arun, a stream on which our oars would
take us sometimes beyond Amberly, and not bring us back till midnight.
On other occasions we would, like Tennyson's hero, "nourish a youth
sublime" in wandering on the nocturnal beach, and, pre-equipped with
towels, would bathe in the liquid moonlight.
The Littlehampton season, so far as visitors were concerned, was summer,
and from the middle of May onward various ladies of ornamental and
interesting aspect would make their appearance on the pavement of Beach
Terrace, or, seen on the balconies of houses which had just unclosed
their shutters, would trouble and enliven the atmosphere with
suggestions of vague adventures. Some of these we came to know, as Mr.
Philpot and his wife had many mundane acquaintances. Others--and indeed
most of them--remained tantalizing mysteries to the end. At all events
they filled the air with the subtle pollen of a romance which a closer
familiarity with them might very possibly have destroyed.
The effect on myself of such influences was presently betrayed by the
fact that poetry, as understood by Pope, no longer satisfied me. I
gradually submitted to the dominion of Keats, Browning, and Matthew
Arnold. Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far
escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a
beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place--
Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir,
Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness
The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.
One of my fellow pupils, whose youth had an air of manhood, and who
played with much expression on the cornet, confided to me, on returning
from a summer holiday, his adventures on the Lake of Como, where,
resting on his oars, he had agitated with his musical notes the pulses
of a fair companion. "Now there," he said, "you have something which, if
you tried, you might manage to make a verse about." I tried, and the
result was this:
The stars are o'er our heads in hollow skies,
In hollow skies the stars beneath our boat,
Between the stars of two infinities
Midway upon a gleaming film we float.
My lips are on the sounding horn;
The sounding horn with music fills.
Faint echoes backward from the world are born,
Tongued by yon distant zone of slumbering hills.
The world spreads wide on every side,
But cold and dark it seems to me.
What care I on this charmèd tide
For aught save those far stars and thee?
I accomplished, however, such feats of imagination, not on my friend's
behalf only, but on my own also. Readers of _Martin Chuzzlewhit_ will
remember how "Baily Junior," who was once bootboy at Mrs. Todger's
boarding-house, imagined that Mrs. Gamp was in love with him, and that
her life was blighted by the suspicion that such a passion was hopeless.
I, in common with other imaginative boys, was frequently beatified by
the magic of a not unlike illusion. My practical hopes for the future,
so far as I troubled to form any, were to enter the diplomatic service
as soon as I left Oxford, and it seemed to me that this or that
distinguished and beautiful lady, old enough to be my mother, would
meanwhile be blighted by some hopeless passion for myself, or
else--what, in my opinion, was a still more exciting alternative--that I
should, like another Byron, be blighted into renown through her
treachery by a misplaced passion for _her_. As I paced the sands at
Littlehampton, I pictured myself as having discovered her faithlessness
on the eve of my own departure for the Embassy at Constantinople, and I
addressed to her the following epistle, which I could not, with all my
ingenuity, manage to protract beyond the two opening stanzas:
For you the ballroom's jaded glow--
The gems unworthy of your hair.
For me the milk-white domes that blow
Their bubbles to the orient air.
Your heart at dawn in curtained ease
Shall ache through dreams that are not rest.
But mine shall leap to meet the seas
That broke against Leander's breast.
Such dreams are not more absurd than those of the French Jacobins, who
thought themselves Gracchus or Brutus; and they were accompanied when I
was at Littlehampton by the growth of other preoccupations, which
related to matters very different from the romance of individual
adolescence. Mr. Philpot, in his own tastes, and also in his choice of
pupils, was fastidious to a degree, which perhaps would be out of date
to-day, and had actually been known to apologize, under his breath, for
the fact that one of his flock--a singularly handsome youth and heir to
an enormous fortune--came of a family which "was still distinctly in
business." But he betrayed, at the same time, strong Radical leanings.
Indeed, through him I first became aware that Radicalism meant more than
some perverse absurdity of the ignorant. He completely bewildered and at
the same time amused his pupils by taking in a paper called _The
Beehive_, one of the earliest of the "Labor organs" of England; and from
this mine of wisdom he would on occasion quote. To most of us the views
expressed by him seemed no more than comic oddities, but they were to
myself so far a definite irritant that I devised, though I never showed
them to him, a series of pictures called "The Radical's Progress," in
which the hero began as a potboy in a public house, and ended as an
overdressed ruffian, waving a tall silk hat and throwing rotten eggs at
Conservative voters from a cart. A taste of Mr. Philpot's equalitarian
sentiments was given to us one day at luncheon, the occasion being his
wife's commendation of a celebrated Sussex bootmaker who had just called
for orders. "I like that man," she said. "He is always so civil and
respectful." "Mary Jane! Mary Jane!" said Mr. Philpot, clearing his
throat, and speaking from the other end of the table, "that
respectfulness of yours is a quality to which I myself attach very
little importance." In view of this speech we felt considerable
satisfaction when, a few hours later, the day being the 5th of November,
a disturbance was made by some boys at the front door, and Mr. Philpot,
snatching up a tall hat, went out to appease the storm by the serene
majesty of his presence. He was far from gratified when the immediate
result of his intervention was to elicit the disrespectful cry of "Hit
'n on the bloody drum."
But, besides the novelty, as we thought it, of his vague democratic
opinions, he exhibited what to me was at least equally novel--namely, a
liberalism before unknown to me with regard to theological doctrine. He
never obtruded this on us in any systematic way; but on not infrequent
occasions he solemnly gave us to understand that dissenters enjoyed the
means of salvation no less fully than Churchmen; that sacraments were
mere symbols useful for edification according to varying circumstances;
that sacerdotal orders were mere certificates of the fitness of
individuals for the office of Christian ministers, and that everything
in the nature of dogmatic authority was due to, and tainted with, the
apostacy of Babylonian Rome. To myself all this was shocking in an
extreme degree, and I began to ask myself the question, which might
otherwise not have occurred to me, of whether the Church of Rome was not
perhaps the one true religion, after all.
These movements of the spirit on my part led to the following incident.
Among Mr. Philpot's pupils was a shy and very delicate boy, whose
parents took a house at Littlehampton, and with whom he lived. His
father was a fire-eating Irish baronet, who might have walked out of the
pages of one of Lever's novels. His diet was as meager as that of an
Indian fakir, though not otherwise resembling it. It consisted of rum
and milk; and his favorite amusement was lying down on his bed and
shooting with a pistol at the wick of a lighted candle. His wife--a lady
of gentle and somewhat sad demeanor--one day took it into her head to
join the Catholic Church; and Mr. Philpot hastened, as soon as he heard
the news, to ask her, in the name of common sense and of conscience,
what could have induced her to take a step so awful. Her answer, so he
informed me afterward, was that I had told her that it was the best
thing she could do. I had no recollection of having tendered to her any
such momentous advice, and Mr. Philpot, who hardly could help smiling,
acquitted me of playing intentionally the part of a disguised Jesuit. I
must, however, have said something on behalf of the mystical Babylon,
for not long afterward I was busy with a theological poem, prominent in
which were the two following lines:
Oh, mother, or city of the sevenfold throne,
We sit beside the severing sea and mourn--
and by way of correcting such defects in my sentiments Mr. Philpot lent
me a work by Archer Butler, a Christian Platonist, who would provide me,
in his opinion, with a religious philosophy incomparably more rational
than the Roman. This work had the result of directing me to certain old
translations of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists of Alexandria; and my
dominant idea for a time was that in Alexandrian mysticism Anglicans
would discover a rock, firmly based, on which they would bring Rome to
her knees, and conquer the whole world.
But such juvenile theologies, and the secret troubles connected with
them, did not seriously interfere with the adventurous optimism of
youth. They did but give a special flavor to the winds blown from the
sea, to the suggestions of the sunsets on which the eyes of youth
looked, and mixed themselves with the verses of Browning, Matthew
Arnold, and Shelley. But a yet more successful rival to the speculations
of Archer Butler and Plotinus was, in my own case, another and a new
poet, who had at that time just made himself famous. This poet was
Swinburne, who had recently given to the world his first _Poems and
Ballads_. That volume, on the ground that it was an outrage on morals
and decency, had been received, when originally published, with such a
howl of execration that the publishers hastily withdrew it, and for some
time it was unobtainable; but at length another firm found courage
enough to undertake its reissue. To Mr. Philpot, who knew it merely by
extracts, the mere mention of this volume seemed to be something in the
nature of an indecency. But there is always an attraction in the
forbidden. I dreamed of this volume, from which I had seen extracts
likewise; and at last a chance came to me of securing an apple from the
boughs of this replanted tree of knowledge.
Among our various dissipations were occasional excursions to Brighton,
and on one of these I was accompanied by a fellow pupil whose family had
a house there in one of the then fashionable squares. The family was
absent, but the house was open, and my friend proposed that we should
sleep there and make a night of it. We accordingly telegraphed to Mr.
Philpot that we should be back next day by breakfast time, and arranged
to dine early, and spend the evening at the play. As we walked to the
theater we found the shops still open, and we paused to look for a
moment at the windows of Treacher's Library. In a long row of volumes I
saw one bound in green. Its gilt lettering glittered, and the gaslight
revealed to me the reissued poems of Swinburne. I went in and bought it
and entered the dress circle hugging this priceless treasure. The play,
I believe, had something to do with racing, but I hardly looked at the
stage. My eyes and attention were magnetized by the green object on my
knee. I occasionally peeped at its pages; but the light, while the play
was in progress, was too dim to render the print legible. Between the
acts, however, I began to decipher stanzas such as the following, and
notes new to the world invaded my ears like magic:
The sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea,
or again:
As the waves of the ebb drawing seaward
When their hollows are full of the night.
When had words, I asked myself, ever made music such as this? I felt by
the time I got back to my friend's door that:
I on honeydew had fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
This magic still remained with me when, my days at Littlehampton being
ended, I went at length to Oxford. But meanwhile to my conditions at
home a new element was added, by which the scope of my experiences was
at once greatly enlarged.
I have mentioned already that, during the first sixty years of the
growth of Torquay, the owners of Cockington had preserved their rural
seclusion intact, having refused, during that long period, to permit the
erection of more than two villas on their property. But somewhere about
the year 1860 a solitary exception was made in favor of Mr. William
Froude, my mother's eldest brother, to whom, by my paternal uncle, a
lease was granted of a certain number of acres on the summit of what was
then a wooded and absolutely rural hill. Here he erected a house of
relatively considerable size, from which, as a distant spectacle,
Torquay was visible beyond a tract of intervening treetops. It was
nearing completion at the time when I was first under Mr. Philpot's
care. My father, being a complete recluse, and my kindred, whether at
Cockington Court or otherwise, confining their intimacies to hereditary
friends and connections, I found few fresh excitements at their houses
or his beyond such as I could spin for myself, like a spider, out of my
own entrails. It was, therefore, for me a very agreeable circumstance
that presently in Chelston Cross, while I was still under Mr. Philpot's
care, I was provided with a second home during a large part of my
holidays, and subsequently of my Oxford vacations, where the stir of the
outer world was very much more in evidence.
Distinguished as a man of science, a mathematician, and a classical
scholar, Mr. Froude possessed the most fascinating manners imaginable.
His wife, the daughter of an old-world Devonshire notable who once owned
the borough of Dartmouth, returning two members for it, he himself being
always one, was a woman of remarkable intellect, of a singularly genial
shrewdness, and of manners attractive to every one with whom she might
come in contact. Indeed, no two persons could have been more happily
qualified than Mr. and Mrs. William Froude, together with their daughter
(subsequently Baroness A. von Hugel), to render their house a center of
interesting and intellectual society, and their circle of friends was
widened by two adventitious circumstances. Mrs. Froude, under the
influence of Newman, who was her frequent and intimate correspondent,
had entered the Catholic Church, her children following her example, and
the freemasonry of a common faith resulted in closely connecting her and
hers with various old Catholic families and many distinguished
converts; while Mr. Froude, at the time to which I now refer, was
becoming, through his indulgence in purely accidental taste, a figure in
the world of national, and even of international, affairs.
His favorite recreation was yachting, and one of his possessions was a
sailing yacht. He was thus, as a man of alert observation, led to pay
special attention to the relation of a vessel's lines to its behavior
under different conditions in respect of its stability and speed, and
the project occurred to him of testing his rough conclusions by means of
miniature models, these being placed in some small body of water and
then submitted to systematic experiments. Accordingly, soon after he had
settled himself at Chelston Cross, he proceeded to lease a field which
adjoined his garden, and constructed in it a sort of covered canal,
along which models of various designs were towed, the towing-machine
recording the various results by diagrams. The discoveries which Mr.
Froude thus made soon proved so remarkable that Edward, Duke of Somerset
(then First Lord of the Admiralty), secured for him a government grant,
in order that his operations might be extended, the whole of the earlier
expenses having been borne by Mr. Froude himself. The enterprise soon
attracted the attention of other governments also; Admiral Popoff, on
behalf of the Tsar, having come all the way from Russia to visit Mr.
Froude in connection with it. But the pilgrims to Chelston Cross were
not naval experts only. Torquay was at that time nearing its social
zenith, and the rumor that Mr. Froude was conducting a series of
mysterious experiments which bade fair to revolutionize the naval
architecture of the world stirred interest in many men of
mark--statesmen and others who were far from being naval experts, and
also of ladies, many of them with charming eyes whose attention alone
was, in my opinion at all events, sufficient to throw a halo of success
round any experiment which excited it.
All of these, masculine and feminine alike, were sensible of the charm
of Mr. William Froude and his family; and for many years, even in
London, it would have been difficult to find a house more frequented
than Chelston Cross by a society of well-known and entertaining persons,
not only English, but continental and American also. Thus, during the
years of my tutelage at Littlehampton and Oxford, which comprised but
occasional and brief visits to London, I acquired a considerable
acquaintance, and what may be called some knowledge of the world, before
I had entered the world as my own master and on my own account. Of the
persons with whom I became, during that period, familiar some idea may
be given by a mention of the names, or by brief sketches, of a few of
them--those being selected who, whether as types or otherwise, may still
have some meaning and interest for the social generation of to-day.
CHAPTER IV
WINTER SOCIETY AT TORQUAY
Early Acquaintance with Society--Byron's Grandson--Lord
Houghton--A Dandy of the Old School--Carlyle--Lord Lytton, and
Others--Memorable Ladies
Of the men--the noteworthy men--with whom I thus became acquainted
before I had escaped from the torture of my last examination at Oxford,
most had a taste for literature, while some had achieved renown in it.
Of these, however, the first with whom I became intimate was one whose
literary connections were vicarious rather than personal. My friendship
with him originated in the fact that he was an old friend of the
Froudes, and, as soon as Chelston Cross was completed, he would pay them
protracted visits there. This was the then Lord Wentworth, who for me
was a magical being because he was Byron's grandson. Another
acquaintance who brought with him a subtle aroma of poetry was
Wentworth's remarkable brother-in-law, Wilfrid Blunt, then the
handsomest of our younger English diplomatists, a breeder of Arab
horses, and also the author of love poems which deserve beyond all
comparison more attention than they have yet received. Others again were
Robert Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Swinburne. These I met either at
Oxford or in London, but to those whom I came to know through the
William Froudes at Torquay may be added Aubrey de Vere, the Catholic
poet of Ireland, Lord Houghton, Lord Lytton, the novelist, and the
second Lord Lytton, his son, known to all lovers of poetry under the
pseudonym of "Owen Meredith." As figures then prominent in the winter
society of Torquay, I may mention also a courtly cleric, the Rev. Julian
Young, a great diner out and giver of dinners to the great, a raconteur
of the first order, a very complete re-embodiment of the spirit of
Sidney Smith, and, further, an old Mr. Bevan, who, sixty years before,
when he occupied a house in Stratton Street, had flourished as an
Amphitryon and a dandy under the patronage of the Prince Regent.
Of the ladies of Torquay who, together with men like these, were
prominent in my social landscape as I to-day recollect it, it is less
easy to speak, partly because they were more numerous, and partly
because many of them impressed me in more elusive ways. I may, however,
mention a few of them who were well known as hostesses--the Dowager Lady
Brownlow, Mrs. Vivian, Lady Erskine of Cambo, Lady Louisa Finch-Hatton,
Miss Burdett-Coutts, and Susan, Lady Sherborne. All these ladies were
the occupants of spacious houses the doors of which were guarded by
skillfully powdered footmen, and which, winter after winter, were so
many social centers. Lady Sherborne, indeed, was far more than a
hostess: she was unrivaled as a singer of simple English songs--songs
which her low voice filled with every trouble of which the human heart
is capable; and as such she was, under a thin disguise, celebrated by
the first Lord Lytton in one of his latest novels. To these ladies might
be added innumerable others whose claims on my memory do not in all
cases lend themselves to very exact statement. Most of them were
English, and some of them, then in the bloom of youth and beauty, have
between that time and this played their parts in the London world and
ended them. But not a few were foreign--vivacious Northerners from New
York, with the sublimated wealth of all Paris in their petticoats;
Southerners whose eyes were still plaintive with memories of the Civil
War; Austrians such as the von Hugels; Germans such as Countess Marie
and Countess Helen Bismarck; and Russians whose figures and faces I
remember much more accurately than their names.
It is idle, however, to say more of these, whose charms are with the
last year's snows. And yet of these there were two of whom I may, for
purposes of illustration, say something in detail. The two were
sisters--we may call them Miss X and Miss Y--whose invalid father, a
cadet of a well-known family, rarely left Torquay, where for some months
of the year his daughters, otherwise emancipated from parental control,
stayed with him. Both of these sisters were beautiful, and, so far as
the resident ladies of Torquay were concerned, they received what is
incomparably the sincerest form of homage that extraordinary beauty can
elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as
possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her
reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it
(I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the
colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of
dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any
prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often
fulfill themselves, but an exception to this rule was one day made in my
favor.
As I was going home for my holidays from Littlehampton to Devonshire, my
compartment at Eastleigh Junction was invaded by a feminine apparition,
accompanied by a French poodle, which she placed on the cushion opposite
to her. Her dress, though I divined its perfection, was quiet and plain
enough; but the compartment, as soon as she entered it, seemed to be
filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water
sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of
"Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation,
entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness
not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation.
She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to
literature--I cannot remember how--and a moment later she was
vouchsafing to me the intimate information that she was a poetess, and
had contributed an anonymous poem to a certain lately published
collection. Then, having caught my name on a printed label, she said,
with a smile, "Is it possible that you are on your way to Torquay?" I
answered that I should be there shortly, and, while elaborating this
proposition, I managed to inspect the French poodle's collar, on which
was engraved the name of the fair owner. In a flash the personality of
this "daughter of dreams" was disclosed to me. This was Miss X, the most
talked about of the two wonderful sisters. As I gathered that she
herself would be soon at Torquay likewise, I tried, when she got out at
some intermediate station, to express a hope that, if we met in the
street, she would not have wholly forgotten me; but my modesty would not
allow me to find adequate words. On the Parade, however, at Torquay, a
fortnight later we did meet. She at once welcomed me with a laugh as
though I were an old acquaintance, and my intimacy with her lasted so
long, and to so much practical purpose, that it wrung from me at last a
poem of which the concluding lines were these:
Pause not to count the cost;
Think not, or all is lost--
Fly thou with me.
But the "incident," in parliamentary language, was soon afterward
"closed," partly because of her marriage to a very sensible husband,
and partly because, having become acquainted with her sister, I began to
look on the sister as the more romantic figure of the two.
The most successful rival, however, to the excitements of young romance
is to be found by some natures in the more complex stimulations of
society. In these the feminine element plays a conspicuous part; but a
part no less conspicuous is that played by the masculine. Moreover, as
the object of the social passion, unlike that of the romantic, is not
identified with the vagaries of any one individual, society for those
who court it is a corporation that never dies. It is for each individual
what no one individual ever can be--namely, a challenge to faculties or
acquirements which are coextensive with life. I will, therefore, turn
from Miss X, and the lines in which I suggested an elopement with her as
a project desirable for both of us, to some of the male celebrities
whose names I have just mentioned, and describe how they impressed me
when I first made their acquaintance.
Of the well-known visitors who wintered at Torquay none was more
punctual in his appearance than Lord Houghton, who found an annual home
there in the house of two maiden aunts. Through these long-established
residents he had for years been familiar with my family, and from the
first occasion on which I met him he exhibited a friendship almost
paternal for myself. Lord Houghton was a man who, as Dryden said of
Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books
had been equal to his conversation. Certainly nothing which he wrote, or
which a biographer has written about him, gives any idea of the gifts--a
very peculiar mixture--which made him a marked figure in any company
which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the
fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither,
such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and
his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed
with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching
at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had
ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my
life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always
wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting
at dinner by the celebrated Lady E---- of T----, who was indulging in a
long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation.
"When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my
feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of
your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me
of a perplexing situation in which he had once found himself, and of how
he sought counsel about it from Lord Houghton, his kinsman. Gaskell's
difficulty was this. A friend for whom he was acting as trustee had,
without imposing on him any legal obligations in the matter, begged him
with his dying breath to carry out certain instructions. These seemed to
Gaskell extremely unwise, and objectionable, "and yet," he said to Lord
Houghton, "of course a peculiar sanctity attaches, itself to dying
wishes. What would you do in such a situation as mine?" For a little
while Lord Houghton reflected, and then answered, with an air of grave
detachment, "I always tell my family totally to disregard everything I
say during the last six months of my life."
Of his social philosophy otherwise he gave me in the days of my youth
many pithy expositions, with hints as to what I should do when I entered
the world myself. One of his pieces of advice was especially appropriate
to Torquay. This was to make the acquaintance of old Mr. Bevan, a
lifelong intimate of his own. Accordingly my introduction to this
mysterious personage was accomplished.
Mr. Bevan lived in a large villa close to that which was occupied by
Miss Burdett-Coutts. Its discreetly shuttered windows, like so many
half-closed eyelids, gave, when viewed externally, the impression that
it was asleep or tenantless; but to ring the front-door bell was to
dissipate this impression immediately. The portals seemed to open by
clockwork. Heavy curtains were withdrawn by servitors half seen in the
twilight, and the visitors were committed to the care of an Austrian
groom of the chambers, who, wearing the aspect of a king who had
stepped out of the Almanach de Gotha, led the way over soundless carpets
to a library. This was furnished with a number of deep armchairs; and I
recollect how, on the first occasion of my entering it, each of these
chairs was monopolized by a drowsy Persian cat. For a moment, the light
being dim, these cats, so it seemed to me, were the sole living things
present; but a second later I was aware that a recumbent figure was
slowly lifting itself from a sofa. This was Mr. Bevan. His attire was a
blue silk dressing-gown, a youthfully smart pair of black-and-white
check trousers, varnished boots, and a necktie with a huge pearl pin in
it, the pearl itself representing the forehead of a human skull. His
hands were like ivory, his face was like a clear-cut cameo. With the aid
of a gold-headed cane that had once belonged to Voltaire he gently
evicted a cat, so that I might occupy the chair next to him, and said,
in the language of Brummell's time, that he was "monstrous glad to see
me." He pointed to objects of interest which adorned his walls and
tables, such as old French fashion-plates of ladies in very scanty
raiment; to musical clocks, of which several were presents from crowned
heads; to sketches by d'Orsay, and to framed tickets for Almack's.
"Whenever the dear lady next door," he said, with a glance at the
seminudities of the French fashion-plates, and alluding to Miss
Burdett-Coutts, "comes to have a dish of tea with me, I have to lock
those things up. I fear," he said, presently, "I'm in a shocking bad
odor with her now." Only last night, he explained, he had received from
one of the French Rothschilds a magnificent _pâté de foie gras_; and,
having himself no parties in prospect, he sent this gastronomical
treasure to Miss Coutts, who was about to entertain, as he knew, a large
company at luncheon. There was one thing, however, which he did not
know--the luncheon was to be given to the members of a certain society
which had for its object the protection of edible animals from any form
of treatment by which they might be needlessly incommoded. What, then,
were the feelings of the hostess when she suddenly discovered that a
dish which, with Mr. Bevan's compliments, had been solemnly placed
before her was the most atrocious of all the abominations which the
company had assembled to denounce! "It was sent back to me," said Mr.
Bevan, "as though it were the plague in person. It's a pity that you and
I can't eat it together. I'd ask you to dinner if only I were sure of my
new cook. My last cook was with me for twenty years. Shall I tell you
what he wrote in a letter when he had left me to join the army during
the Franco-German War? 'Alas! monsieur,' he said, 'I must now make
sorties instead of _entrées_.'" The banquet, however, which Mr. Bevan
had suggested--and it was followed by others--took place before many
days were over. The guests numbered eight or nine. I cannot recollect
who they were; but the cooking, the wines, and the decorations of the
table would have satisfied Ouida herself. The china, covered with royal
crowns, was a gift from Louis Philippe. The wines, of which the names
and dates were murmured by the servants who dispensed them, seemed all
to have come from the cellars of a Rothschild or an Austrian emperor,
while every dish was a delicacy unique in its composition and flavor,
the last of them being a sort of "trifle," which the artistry of a
_chef_ had converted into the form of a pope's tiara. Mr. Bevan, in
short, was a model of the ultrafastidious man of the world as he figures
in the novels of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. I mentioned this impression
of him some time afterward to Lord Houghton, and he said: "There's a
very good reason for it. When Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli entered the
London world, Mr. Bevan was one of their earliest friends. He privately
helped Disraeli in social and other ways. To him Bulwer Lytton owed his
first personal knowledge of the then world of the dandies; and Mr.
Bevan," said Lord Houghton, "was the actual model from which, by both
these writers, their pictures of the typical man of the world were
drawn."
My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord
Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of
a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was
one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed
that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame
was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite
drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack
on "the dandies" in his book, _Sartor Resartus_, which many earnest and
ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself
sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my
antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief
visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking
me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing
what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me
to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to
Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great
philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping
over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his
back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty
dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his
integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt,
unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move
across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by
sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite,
I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To
me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the
result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me
represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently
proposed that we should all go out for a walk, and as soon as we were in
the open air, the philosopher blew his nose in a pair of old woolen
gloves. I here saw at once an illustration of the chapter in _Sartor
Resartus_ in which the author denounced what he christened "The Sect of
the Dandies," as described and glorified by Bulwer Lytton in _Pelham_.
Illustration could go no farther.
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE]
The very next famous man whom I met after this glimpse of Carlyle I met
a little later at Torquay. The famous man was Lord Lytton himself. He
was dining at Chelston Cross, and, owing to some lady's defection, I was
actually his nearest neighbor. I saw in him everything which the spirit
of Carlyle hated. I saw in him everything which was then in my opinion
admirable. All the arts of appearance, conversation, and demeanor which
in Carlyle were aggressively absent were in him exhibited in a manner
perhaps even too apparent. I was indeed, despite my reverence for him,
faintly conscious myself that his turquoise shirt stud, set with
diamonds, was too large, and that his coat would have been in better
taste had the cuffs not been of velvet. But it seemed to me that from
his eyes, keen, authoritative, and melancholy, all the passions, all the
intellect, and all the experiences of the world were peering. To have
sat by him was an adventure; to have been noticed by him was not far
from a sacrament.
Before very long, and likewise at Chelston Cross, I became acquainted
with his son, "Owen Meredith," afterward Viceroy of India. Having heard
that, like him, I was touched with the fever of the Muses, he at once
showed me signs of an amity which ended only with his life. Treating me
as though I were a man of the same age as himself, he would take my arm,
when wandering in the Froudes' shrubberies, and describe to me the poems
to the production of which his future years would be consecrated, or ask
me to confide to him my corresponding ambitions in return. Like most
poets, he was not without personal vanities; but never was a man more
free from anything like jealousy of a rival. To praise others was a
pleasure to him as natural as that of being praised himself.
To some of the celebrities associated with my youthful days I was
introduced, as I have said already, not at Torquay, but at Oxford. There
was one, however, whom, though essentially an Oxonian, I first met at
Torquay. This was Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol, to whose
college I was destined to be subsequently either a disgrace or ornament.
Jowett was frequently at Torquay, having a sister who lived there, and
he was specially asked to luncheon at Chelston Cross to inspect me and
see how I should pass muster as one of his own disciples. His blinking
eyes, the fresh pink of his cheeks, his snow-white hair, and the
birdlike treble of his voice, have been often enough described, and I
will only say of them here that, when he took me for a walk in the
garden, I subconsciously felt them--I cannot tell why--to be formidable.
He inquired as to my tastes and interests with a species of curt
benignity; but to my interest in poetry he exhibited a most
disconcerting indifference, and I felt during the whole of our interview
that I was walking with a mild east wind. In this he was a marked
contrast to Ruskin, Robert Browning, and certain others--especially to
"Owen Meredith"--men between whom and myself there was at once some
half-conscious bond. There are no estrangements so elusive, and yet so
insuperable, as those which arise from subtle discords in temperament.
And yet in certain individual acts, to which I shall refer presently,
Jowett treated me, when I was safely settled at Oxford, with much
sympathetic good nature. But these and other Oxford experiences shall be
reserved for another chapter.
CHAPTER V
EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD
Early Youth at Oxford--Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne,
and Ruskin--Dissipation of an Undergraduate--The Ferment of
Intellectual Revolution--_The New Republic_
My experiences at Oxford I may divide into two groups--namely, those
belonging to the social life of an undergraduate, and those consisting
of the effects--philosophical, moral, or religious--produced in an
undergraduate's mind by the influence of academic teaching.
As to my social experiences, my recollections are, on the whole,
pleasurable, but they are somewhat remote from anything that can
properly be called scholastic. They are associated with the charm of
certain cloistered buildings--with Magdalen especially, and the shades
of Addison's Walk; with country drives in dogcarts to places like Witney
and Abingdon; with dinners there in the summer evenings, and with a
sense of being happily outside the radius of caps and gowns; with supper
parties during the race weeks to various agreeable ladies; and with a
certain concert which, during one Commemoration, was given by myself and
a friend to a numerous company, and for which the mayor was good enough
to lend us the Town Hall.
From the incubus of mere collegiate discipline I was perhaps more free
than nine undergraduates out of ten. At the time when I matriculated
there were within the college precincts no quarters available; and I and
a fellow freshman who was in the same position as myself managed to
secure a suite of unusually commodious lodgings. That particular
partnership lasted only for a term, but subsequently I and two other
companions took the whole upper part of a large house between us. We
were never what is called "in college"; we rarely dined in Hall, having,
besides a good cook, a very good dining room of our own, where we gave
little dinners, much to our own contentment. We had, moreover, a spare
bedroom, in which on occasion we could put up a visitor. One visitor who
stayed with us for some weeks was Wentworth. Little things remain in the
mind when greater things are forgotten; and one little incident which I
remember of Wentworth's visit was this. Those were days when, for some
mysterious reason, men, when they smoked, were accustomed to wear
smoking caps. Wentworth had one of Oriental design, which he would
somehow attach to his head by means of a jeweled pin. One evening when
he was adjusting it the light caught his features at some peculiar
angle, and for a fugitive moment his face was an exact and living
reproduction of one of the best-known portraits of Byron.
Another incident belonging to this same order of memories occurred
during one of the race weeks. About half past ten one evening,
accompanied by three companions, I was making my way along a rather
ill-illuminated street. My three companions were feminine, and the
dresses of two of them--triumphs of the latest fashion--were calculated
to arrest attention as though they were so much undulating moonlight.
Suddenly I was aware that a strange voice was addressing me. It was the
voice of a proctor, who, attended by several "bulldogs," was asking me,
with a sinister though furtive glance at the ladies, what I was doing,
and why I was not in cap and gown. I could see in his eyes a sense of
having very neatly caught me in a full career of sin. I explained to him
that Mrs. L., wife of one of the greatest of the then university
magnates, and her two charming daughters had just been so kind as to
have had supper with me, and that I was seeing them back to All Souls'.
To return, however, to the first week or fortnight which saw me and my
original housemate established as full-blown freshmen; I cannot for the
life of me remember by what steps we entered on any course of formal
instruction, but he and I were told with very surprising promptitude
that we should, without loss of time, give a breakfast to the Balliol
Eight. We did so, and never before had I seen on any one matutinal
tablecloth provisions which weighed so much, or disappeared so rapidly.
Not many days later I found myself at another breakfast table of a very
different character, in the capacity not of host, but guest. The host
on this occasion was Jowett, who asked me to breakfast with him in order
that I might meet Browning. Browning by some one or other--I think it
was James Spedding--had been shown certain manuscript verses--precious
verses of my own. He had sent me a message of a flattering kind with
regard to them, and he now held out both his hands to me with an almost
boisterous cordiality. His eyes sparkled with laughter, his beard was
carefully trimmed, and an air of fashion was exhaled from his dazzling
white waistcoat. He did not embarrass me by any mention of my own
performances. He did not, so far as I remember, make any approach to the
subject of literature at all, but reduced both Jowett and myself to
something like complete silence by a constant flow of anecdotes and
social allusions, which, though not deficient in point, had more in them
of jocularity than wit. He was not, perhaps, my ideal of the author of
"Men and Women," or the singer of "Lyric Love" as "a wonder and a wild
desire"; but there the great man was, and when I quitted his presence
and found myself once more in undergraduate circles I felt myself
shining like Moses when he came down from the mount.
I was subsequently enveloped in a further reflected glory, due also to
Jowett's kindness--a kindness which survived many outbursts of what I
thought somewhat petulant disapproval. I received from him one day a
curt invitation to dinner, and presented myself, wondering mildly to
what this mark of favor could be due. But wonder turned to alarm when,
on entering the Master's drawing-room, I discovered in the dim twilight
no other figure than his own. His manner, however, though not effusive,
was civil, and was certainly fraught with no menace of any coming
judgment on my sins. We exchanged some ordinary observations on the
weather and kindred topics. Then, looking over his shoulder, he uttered
a half-audible word or two, which, being plainly not addressed to me,
must have been addressed to somebody else. Presently, out of the
shadows, a somebody else emerged. This was a person remarkable for the
large size of his head, his longish hair, his insignificant stature, and
his singularly sloping shoulders. I was introduced to him without
catching his name. Dinner was announced forthwith. It was evident that,
except for myself, this person was to be the sole guest. In the
candlelight of the dinner table I realized that this person was
Swinburne.
The dinner passed off pleasantly. Swinburne showed himself an
intelligent, though by no means a brilliant, talker; and as soon as we
had returned to the drawing room, where we drank a cup of coffee
standing, Jowett, who had some engagement, abruptly left us to finish
the evening by ourselves. On Swinburne the effect of the Master's
disappearance was magical. His manner and aspect began to exhibit a
change like that of the moon when a dim cloud drifts away from it. Of
what we discussed at starting I have not the least remembrance, but
before very long Swinburne was on the subject of poetry. His
observations at first consisted of general criticisms. Then he began to
indulge in quotations from various poems--none of them, I think, from
his own; but, however this may have been, the music seemed to intoxicate
him. The words began to thrill me with the spell of his own recitation
of them. Here at last I realized the veritable genius who had made the
English language a new instrument of passion. Here at last was the
singer for whose songs my ears were shells which still murmured with
such lines as I had first furtively read by the gaslight of the Brighton
theater. My own appreciation as a listener more and more encouraged him.
If he began a quotation sitting, he would start from his chair to finish
it. Finally he abandoned the restraints of a chair altogether. He began,
with gesticulating arms, to pace the room from one end to the other,
reciting passage after passage, and appealing to me, who managed to keep
pace with him, for applause. "The most beautiful lines that Tennyson
ever wrote," he exclaimed, "were these, from 'Maud':
"And like silent lightning under the stars
She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest.
"Yes," he went on, "and what did the dream-Maud tell her lover when she
had got him? That the salvation of the world depended on the Crimean
War and the prosecution of Lord Palmerston's policy." Finally he strayed
into quotations from Sidney Dobell, a writer now hardly remembered, with
one of which, describing a girl bathing, he made the Master's academic
rafters ring:
"She, with her body bright sprinkles the waters white,
Which flee from her fair form, and flee in vain,
Dyed with the dear unutterable sight,
And circles out her beauties to the circling main."
He was almost shouting these words when another sound became
audible--that of an opening door, followed by Jowett's voice, which said
in high-pitched syllables, "You'd both of you better go to bed now."
My next meeting with Swinburne took place not many days later. He had
managed meanwhile to make acquaintance with a few other
undergraduates--all of them enthusiastic worshipers--one of whom
arranged to entertain him at luncheon. As I could not, being otherwise
engaged, be present at this feast myself, I was asked to join the party
as soon as possible afterward. I arrived at a fortunate moment. Most of
the guests were still sitting at a table covered with dessert dishes.
Swinburne was much at his ease in an armchair near the fireplace, and
was just beginning, as a number of smiling faces showed, to be not only
interesting, but in some way entertaining also. He was, as I presently
gathered, about to begin an account of a historical drama by himself,
which existed in his memory only--a sort of parody of what Victor Hugo
might have written had he dramatized English events at the opening of
the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said, showed England on
the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful orgies of the
Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing effrontery,
had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell, who
had for his rival "Sir Peel." Sir Peel was represented as pleading his
own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you
love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love
Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I
cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then
followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket." In a later act
it appeared that the Queen and Lord John Russell had between them given
the world a daughter, who, having been left to her own devices, or, in
other words, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded
some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of
much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded
her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody
entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the
rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of
everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done
everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she
looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a
flower she murmured 'mother.'"
The vivacity and mischievous humor with which Swinburne gave his account
of this projected play exhibited a side of his character which I have
never even seen mentioned, and the appreciation and surprise of his
audience were obviously a great delight to him. He lay back in his
chair, tossed off a glass of port, and presently his mood changed.
Somehow or other he got to his own serious poems; and before we knew
where we were he was pouring out an account of _Poems and Ballads_, and
explaining their relation to the secrets of his own experiences. There
were three poems, he said, which beyond all the rest were biographical:
"The Triumph of Time," "Dolores," and "The Garden of Proserpine." "The
Triumph of Time" was a monument to the sole real love of his life--a
love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in woman.
"Dolores" expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the
madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly.
"The Garden of Proserpine" expressed his revolt against the flesh and
its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of
undisturbed rest. His audience, who knew these three poems by heart,
held their breaths as they listened to the poet's own voice, imparting
its living tones to passages such as the following--
This is from "The Triumph of Time":
"I will say no word that a man may say,
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been, and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be."
This is from "Dolores":
"Oh, garment not golden but gilded,
Oh, garden where all men may dwell,
Oh, tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven out of hell."
This is from "The Garden of Proserpine":
"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free;
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
Then, like a man waking up from a dream, Swinburne turned to our host
and said, nervously, "Can you give me another glass of port?" His glass
was filled, he emptied it at a single draught, and then lay back in his
chair like a child who had gone to sleep, the actual fact being, as his
host soon recognized, that, in homely language, he was drunk.
Drink, indeed, was Swinburne's great enemy. He had, when I met him at
Balliol, finished his own career there more than twelve years ago; but
he had since then been a frequent guest of the Master's, who treated
him, in respect of this weakness, with a watchful and paternal care.
When I dined with him at the Master's Lodge there was nothing to tempt
him but a little claret and water. The consequence was that afterward he
was brilliant as the burning bush till he finally went in his sober
senses to bed. He was not, I think, intemperate in the sense that he
drank much. His misfortune was that a very little intoxicated him.
I associate my early days at Balliol with yet another memorable meeting.
One of the most prominent and dignified of the then residents at Oxford
was Sir Henry Acland, who, as a Devonshire man, knew many of my
relations, and had also heard something about myself. He was a friend
and entertainer of men of all sorts of eminence; and while I was still
more or less a freshman he invited me to join at his house a very small
company in the evening, the star of the occasion being a university
lecturer on art, who was just entering on his office, and whose name was
illustrious wherever the English language was spoken. He, too, knew
something about me, having been shown some of my verses, and to meet him
was one of my cherished dreams. Only half a dozen people were present,
and from a well-known portrait of him by Millais I recognized his form
at once. This was Ruskin. He had sent me, through Lord Houghton or
somebody, a verbal message of poetic appreciation already. I was now
meeting him in the flesh. The first thing in him which struck me was
the irresistible fascination of his manner. It was a manner absolutely
and almost plaintively simple, but that of no diplomat or courtier could
be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning
dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the
question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a
temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different
thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and
Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so
Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know
Ruskin intimately, and my sympathy with his genius never lost its
loyalty, though for a long time certain of his ideas--that is to say,
ideas relating to social politics--were to me barely intelligible, and
though, when they became intelligible, I regarded them as perversely
mischievous.
But beneath these social experiences, many of them sufficiently
frivolous, and all of them superficial in so far as their interest
related to individuals, Oxford provided me with others which went to the
very roots of life. Of these deeper experiences the first was due to
Jowett, though its results, so far as I was concerned, were neither
intended, understood, nor even suspected by him.
The most sensational event which occurred during my first term at
Balliol was the suicide of one of the undergraduates. He was a poor
Scotch student of a deeply religious character, who had found, so his
friends reported, that the faith of his childhood had been taken from
him by Jowett's skeptical teachings, and who had ended by cutting his
throat with a razor in Port Meadow. Jowett preached his funeral
sermon--the only sermon which I ever, so far as my recollection serves
me, heard preached in Balliol chapel by himself or by anybody else.
Jowett, who on the occasion was obviously much moved, chose for his text
the story of the woman taken in adultery, and of Christ's challenge to
her judges, "Which of you will dare to assault with the first stone?"
The course of his argument was curious. He began with examining the
passage from the standpoint of verbal scholarship, the gist of his
criticism being that its authenticity was at least doubtful. From this
argument he diverged into one of wider scope, insisting on how much is
doubtful in what the Gospels record as the sayings of our Lord
generally, from which illuminating reflection he advanced to one wider
still. It was as follows: Since we know so little of what Christ really
said about God, how much less can we really know of the nature of God
himself; of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy,
pardons?--the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and
should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who,
for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable
to God as any one of ourselves.
All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my
impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one
of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and
petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded
as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any
definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief
in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a
scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some
vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very
much more nebulous, or what many would describe as _nil_. A story used
to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and
amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who
confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find
anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's
existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted.
Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of
God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you
down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have
retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able
to adduce yourself?"
But, in speaking of Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly,
speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type,
exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise
representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to
the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far
as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge.
Nearly all the Balliol dons--even those who never spoke of
religion--seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the
dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric
astronomy. They assumed this, just as Jowett did, on what purported to
be scientific grounds, and yet when they sought, as he did, to put in
the place of this some solemn system of quasi-scientific ethics, their
attempts seemed to me to exhibit the same absurdity with which Jowett's
constructive teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of
everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the
overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some
new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce.
Some foretastes of the new gospel had, as I have said already, been
vouchsafed to me at Littlehampton by Mr. Philpot. I now saw what
logically the new gospel implied. The sense of impending catastrophe
became more and more acute. I felt like a man on a ship, who, having
started his voyage in an estuary, and imagining that a deck is by nature
as stable as dry land, becomes gradually conscious of the sway of the
outer sea, until, when he nears the bar, showers of spray fall on him,
he perceives that the bows are plunging, and at last the percussion of
waves makes the whole vessel shudder.
Such, then, were the effects on me of the religious liberalism of
Oxford, and in this respect, as I now see, looking backward, my
condition was temperamentally the same as it had been when I was still
under the tuition of superorthodox governesses. In those days any
questioning of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the miraculous
events recorded in it seemed to me, as it did later, to be at once
absurd and blasphemous. There was, however, even then, something which
to me seemed no less absurd than "the infidel's" attack on the dogmas of
Christian orthodoxy--for I knew that "the infidel" existed--and this was
the manner in which the Anglican clergy defended them. I was always,
when a child, looking forward each week to the Sunday sermon, in the
hope of finding some portions of it which I could either mimic or
parody. I remember one sermon in particular, which the preacher devoted
to a proof of God's existence. My own mental comment was, "If anything
could make me such a fool as to doubt this self-evident truth, your
arguments and the inflections of your voice would certainly make me do
so." I heard another preacher indulge in a long half-hour of sarcasm at
the expense of "the shallow infidel, who pointed to the sky and said,
'Where are the signs of His coming?'" In those days we were required by
a governess to write out the morning's sermon as a pious discipline in
the afternoon. This sermon I reproduced with a series of pictures in the
margin, one of which represented the "shallow infidel" exploring the sky
through a telescope, which he did his best to steady by holding it
against the stem of a palm tree. And yet so literally true did all
orthodox doctrines seem to me that I believed a member of my family to
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by kissing a New Testament
and swearing that one of the nursery maids had mispronounced some
word--an imputation which she had indignantly denied.
This dual mood, as renewed in me by Oxford influences, differed from its
earlier and childish form in the fact that my sense of the absurdities
distinctive of modern religious thought acquired a wider range and went
deeper than I had at first anticipated. The absurdities of which I was
conscious as a child were those of the arguments by which the orthodox
clergy endeavored to defend doctrines which were then for myself
indubitable. At Oxford I became conscious of an absurdity to which as a
child I had been a stranger--namely, the absurdity of the arguments by
which men who repudiated orthodoxy altogether endeavored to establish in
its place some purely natural substitute, such as the "enthusiasm of
humanity," a passion for the welfare of posterity, or a godless
deification of domestic puritanism for its own sake. In addition to this
second absurdity a third gradually dawned on me. This was the
absurdity, common to all parties alike, of supposing that, if the
cardinal doctrines of religious orthodoxy were discredited--namely, that
the human soul is immortal, that the human will is free, and that a God
exists who is interested in the fortunes of each soul
individually--these doctrines, in disappearing, would take away with
them nothing but themselves alone; the actual fact being that they are
known to mankind generally not so much in themselves as in their
indirect effects on that plexus of moral, emotional, and intellectual
values on which all our higher interests in the drama of life depend.
Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the
reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one
kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of
life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism;
and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way
that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel
assent, life, in the higher sense of the word, would--such was my
conviction--soon cease to be tolerable.
The only human being at that time who held and publicly expressed views
similar to my own, so far as I knew, was Ruskin. Of the riddle which I
found so importunate, he did not profess to have discovered any adequate
solution of his own. On the contrary, he confessed himself a victim of a
tragic and desolating doubt, but he did boldly proclaim that until some
solution was found the men of the modern world were of all men the most
miserable. Take, he said, the belief in immortality, which, according to
some men, is a matter of mild indifference. It is really a belief which
affects our whole conception of the human race. Consider, he said, the
carnage of war, with its pile of unnumbered corpses. It must make some
matter to us whether, according to our serious belief, each man has died
like a dog, and left nothing in the way of a personal existence behind
him, or "whether out of every Christian-named portion of that ruinous
heap there has gone forth into the air and the dead-fallen smoke of
battle some astonished condition of soul unwillingly released."
Here, it seemed to me, was the true voice of reason and challenging
passion combined--a voice which would not say "peace when there was no
peace," and which I missed altogether in Jowett and the Oxford liberals
generally. Jowett always regarded me as a mere dilettante and an idler,
who was bound to disgrace Balliol by coming to grief in the schools, and
he was, I think, mortified rather than pleased when I won, in my second
year, the Newdigate prize for poetry.
[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN]
But mine was certainly no mere idler's mood; and whatever Jowett may
have thought of me when he heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my
driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental
life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary,
from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in
tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a
comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which
my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book
was _The New Republic_, with regard to which in this place a few words
may be apposite.
The form of nearly every book is more or less fashioned on some model or
models. My own models in the case of _The New Republic_ were _The
Republic_ of Plato, the _Satyricon_ of Petronius Arbiter, and the
so-called novels of Peacock. All these books introduce us to circles of
friends who discuss questions of philosophy, religion, art, or the
problems of social life, each character representing some prevalent
view, and their arguments being so arranged as to have, when taken
together, some general and coherent meaning. Many of Peacock's
characters are taken direct from life, and in this respect I made myself
a disciple of Peacock. My characters in _The New Republic_ were all
portraits, though each was meant to be typical; but the originals of
some--such as Lady Ambrose, the conventional woman of the world--were of
no public celebrity, and to mention them here would be meaningless. The
principal speakers, however, were drawn without any disguise from
persons so eminent and influential that a definite fidelity of
portraiture was in their case essential to my plan. Mr. Storks and Mr.
Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for
Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was
Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested
by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane";
and finally--more important than any others--Doctor Jenkinson was
Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. All these people I set talking in
polite antagonism to one another, their one underlying subject being the
rational aim of life, and the manner in which a definite supernatural
faith was essential, extraneous, or positively prejudicial to this.
To all the arguments advanced I endeavored to do strict justice, my own
criticisms merely taking the form of pushing most of them to some
consequence more extreme, but more strictly logical, than any which
those who proclaimed them either realized or had the courage to avow.
Thus when Doctor Jenkinson descanted in his sermon on the all-embracing
character of Christianity, I made him go on to say that "true
Christianity embraces all opinions--even any honest denial of itself."
By this passage Browning told me that Jowett was specially exasperated,
and Browning had urged on him that such a temper was quite unreasonable.
I think myself, on the contrary, that Jowett had an excellent reason for
it, this reason being that Jowett's position was false, and that my
method of criticism had brought out its absurdity. Here indeed was the
method employed by me throughout the whole book, except in the case of
Ruskin, and there the method was inverted. Just as I sought to show that
Jowett's principles, if carried far enough, ended in absurdity, so did I
seek to show that Ruskin's principles, despite their superficial
absurdities, ended, if carried far enough, in the nearest approach to
truth which under modern conditions of thought and knowledge is
possible. In my effort to give point to what were really my own
underlying convictions, I wrote _The New Republic_ six or seven times
over, and in doing so it became clearer and clearer to me what my own
convictions were. They ended in an application of the method of a
_reductio ad absurdum_ to everything; and this fact I finally indicated
in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the
title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all
the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."
Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching
of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings
which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and
female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a
moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate
it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely
ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing
better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by
expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could,
after which I would address myself to the project of finding a
foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be
fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When,
however, _The New Republic_ had been completed and given to the world, I
felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had
not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by
another--_The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island_, a
short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's _Candide_. This is a
story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a
demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked
on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading
superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the
sublime service of Humanity--of that "Grand Être," so he says to her,
"which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress
to consist of you and me." _The New Paul and Virginia_ was followed some
two years later by _Is Life Worth Living?_ a formal philosophical
treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with
religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted
to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results
produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had
been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left
Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events
which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own
movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what
is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till
the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the
kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not
disdaining the humble aid of gossip.
CHAPTER VI
THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY
Early Experiences of London Society--Society Thirty Years Ago
Relatively Small--Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish
in Small Societies Only
Comparing London society as it was when I first knew it with what it has
since become, I should say that its two most distinguishing features
were its then comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned
position. Its position was mainly founded on the hereditary possession
of land, its nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families
whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an
agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being
entertained for the few months called "the season." Certain
qualifications in the way of family being given, mere personal charm and
accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in
its ranks. Indeed, such qualifications were by no means always
necessary, as was shown in still earlier days by the cases of Moore and
Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in
London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted,
when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented
by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the form
of inherited land.
This was no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms
of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside
the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people
whose incomes exceeded £5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the
rich class of the country. The condition of things since then has in
this respect been reversed. During the sixty years succeeding the battle
of Waterloo business incomes exceeding £5,000 a year had increased
numerically in the proportion of one to eight, while since that time the
increase has been still more rapid. On the other hand, not only has the
number of the large agricultural landlords shown no increase whatever,
but since the year 1880 or thereabouts their aggregate rental has
suffered an actual decrease, having fallen in the approximate proportion
of seventy to fifty-two. This shrinkage in the fortunes of the old
landed families, except those who were owners of minerals or land near
towns, and the multiplication of families newly enriched by business,
were, when I first knew London, proceeding at a rate which had never
been known before. It was, however, slow in comparison with what it has
since become, and the old landed families, at the time to which I am now
alluding, still retained much of their old prestige and power, as is
shown by the fact that the leaders of both political parties were still
mainly drawn from the limited class in question. It is shown with even
greater clearness by facts more directly presenting themselves to the
eye of the ordinary observer.
One of these is the aspect which thirty years ago was presented by Hyde
Park during the season at certain hours of the day. Thirty years ago,
for an hour or two before luncheon and dinner, its aspect was that of a
garden party, for which, indeed, no invitations were necessary, but on
which as a fact few persons intruded who would have been visibly out of
place on the lawn of Marlborough House. To-day this ornamental
assemblage has altogether disappeared, and its place has been gradually
taken by a miscellaneous crowd without so much as a trace even of
spurious fashion left in it. Thirty years ago Piccadilly in June was a
vision of open carriages brilliant with flowerlike parasols,
high-stepping horses, and coachmen, many of whom still wore wigs. To-day
these features have been submerged by a flow of unending omnibuses which
crowds fight to enter or from which they struggle to eject themselves.
Fashionable hotels have succumbed to the same movement. Of such hotels
thirty years ago the most notable were commonly described as
"private"--a word which implied that no guests were received who were
not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials.
Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this
description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere
chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these
than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by
placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.
But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ
from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less
numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects
which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a
general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social
intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same
time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of
varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot
be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are
provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle
similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily
opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals
belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are
constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life
and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society
which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose
position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no
standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly
simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by
conscious effort or affectation.
The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London
when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in
the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than
that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who
vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names
had a ring of importance when printed in the _Morning Post_, society
was, even for men of conspicuous talent--such, for example, as Lord
Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward--a matter as serious as politics,
or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes
and Kenneth Howard it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon
party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland
asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord
Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a
judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of
to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth
mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar
occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ----'s. That is sure to be good, for
Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her
list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the
cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G----, denounced to a friend the
impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of
her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the
trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were
fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord
Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise
society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real
happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."
The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its
judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was
illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as
she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for
the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of
kindness she attached one strict condition--namely, that the blinds of
the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should
suspect that she--Lady A. herself--was guilty of remaining in London
when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher,
Lady E---- of T----, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on
the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to
form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost
identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, _Pelham_, is
administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially
careful," said Lady E---- to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some
are remarkable for their _chefs_, some for the importance of their
company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to
learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which it will be
enough for him to be merely seen; and, with very few exceptions"--this
was her concluding counsel--"you should never be seen at a ball in a
two-roomed house--a house, for example, like the houses in Eaton Place."
Another sort of social philosopher, in his own way equally typical, was
Hamilton Aidé, who united to the life of society the cultivation of art,
and was equally serious in his combined devotion to both. He was a
musician, a poet, a singer of his own songs in a voice perfectly
modulated. He was also as a painter in water colors one of the most
distinguished amateurs of his time. His landscapes, indeed, and his
sketches of old houses and gardens, Scotch castles, and the seclusions
of Italian villas, were in themselves poems; and when he entertained the
world--a world very carefully chosen--the attention of his guests was
divided between his music and his great portfolios. His bachelor's
quarters provided him with an appropriate background. His writing table
was dominated by something resembling an altarpiece--namely, a large and
ingenious rack, on which was arranged a battalion of invitations to
balls and dinner parties; and his blotting book was flanked by two
delicate volumes, one being a _libro d'oro_ in the shape of a bulky
visiting list, the other being a list of his engagements from day to
day. He and his accomplishments were a finished work of art between
them. But in a larger world his development would have been no more
possible than the development of an orchid in the middle of a crowded
street.
And the same is the case with regard to society generally. There are
certain accomplishments which a small society tends to develop, and
which a larger society does not. Among these the art of conversation is
prominent, especially when it takes the form of wit, or becomes the
vehicle of certain kinds of humor. I may further illustrate this general
observation by mentioning a few individuals, of whom three at least are
still well known by name, not to society only, but also to the world at
large. These are Constance, Duchess of Westminster; Caroline, Duchess of
Montrose, and the Duchess of Somerset, who, as Lady Seymour, was the
heroine of the Eglinton Tournament. These ladies were all remarkable for
the peculiar magic of their voices and for a peculiar sense of humor
which their voices managed to indicate, and which gave its quality to
their general views of life. They none of them laughed audibly, but the
voice of each was a sort of laugh in solution, and this would produce a
sense of laughter in others, even though in the words of the speaker
herself there was no special felicity.
The Duchess of Montrose, by the mere tone in which she mentioned a
name, would often convey a whole criticism of the person named; and
though her topics and language were not infrequently of a kind which
caused austere censors to reprehend, and even to avoid, her, yet if such
censors found themselves by chance in her company, they would one and
all be listening to her before five minutes was over.
The Duchess of Somerset's voice had the same spell of ambushed laughter
in it, but she was a far greater mistress of the actual arts of
language, if "art" be a word appropriate to the exercise of natural
genius. I was asked by her daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, to help her
in compiling a volume of family memoirs, which would, so we hoped, have
comprised a number of the Duchess's letters; but most of these had to be
discarded as not suitable for publication, because of the numerous
sketches contained in them of various friends or connections, which were
drawn with a wit and precision worthy of Miss Austen herself in her
least merciful moments. One specimen, however, may be given without
compunction. She was describing a visit paid by her to a well-known
country house, and mentioned that among the company were a prominent
statesman and his wife, the former of whom was dear to caricaturists on
account of his superabundant figure. "Sir ---- and Lady ---- are here,"
she wrote. "She is expecting; but he shows it most."
Here are examples of conversational or descriptive art which, in a large
and mixed society, would, even if possible, be hardly so much as
perceptible. I may take as two other examples Sophy, Lady Roden, and
Lady Dorothy Nevill. Unlike Lady Dorothy, whose chronicled sayings have
made her a public character, Lady Roden was known only to a small circle
of intimates. She was a daughter of Byron's celebrated friend Mr.
Hobhouse, subsequently Lord Broughton, and had received something of a
really classical education under the semipaternal auspices of Thomas
Love Peacock. Hence her conversation had a certain natural crispness
which enabled her to indicate by touches, however light, any oddities of
demeanor or conduct on the part of friends or acquaintances to persons
whose standards were more or less like her own. There was a silly young
woman who, after several years of matrimony, was ambitious of pushing
her conquests beyond the matrimonial limits; and with this object in
view did her best to be visible driving about with a succession of
guiltlessly apathetic admirers. "Poor Mrs. P----," said Lady Roden. "She
takes far more trouble in attempting to ruin her reputation than most
women do to preserve it; but all her attempts are vain."
Lady Dorothy's charm in conversation was due to an adventurous
whimsicality, perfectly natural, which was absent from Lady Roden's. She
saw everything through a medium of unexpected analogies. She was one day
asked in my hearing whether she had enjoyed herself at a Marlborough
House garden party. "My dear," she said, "half of the people there I had
never seen before in my life, and of those whom I _had_ seen, I thought
that half had been safe in Kensal Green." On another occasion, having
been at a fancy ball--balls were a kind of entertainment which she very
rarely frequented--and having been asked by a friend for an account of
it, she replied: "By far away the most remarkable figure was ----. There
she was--I don't know what she called herself--Diana in front, and
George the Second behind."
But of the conversational art which flourishes in small societies only I
could find the best examples, not among women, but among the men of what
was then an expiring generation--men whose manners had been formed in a
society smaller still. Alfred Montgomery was a wit of this classical
type, and may be taken as representing others, all of whom, when I knew
them, were verging on old age. These men, though free from any trace of
pedantry, were never guilty of slang, unless slang was used
intentionally for the purpose of humorous emphasis. Their conversation,
if taken down verbatim, would have afforded perfect specimens of
polished yet easy English. A lady of great wealth (who has long since
been dead, but who shall nevertheless be nameless) had been for a time
under some sort of social cloud, many influential people having
virtuously refused to notice her. Toward the end of her life, however,
the most august of all possible influences had raised her to a position
of such fashionable brilliance that a great ball given by her had been
the chief event of a season. Lady Roden asked Alfred Montgomery some
question as to who had, and who had not, been there. "When a woman like
Mrs. ---- gives a ball of that kind, it is," he said, "an act of revenge
quite as much as an act of hospitality. She takes far more pleasure in
thinking of the people she has _not_ asked than in thinking of those she
has."
Certain other examples of conversational art occur to me which I
associate with a form of entertainment now a thing of the past. Of
London life as it had been long before I knew it, a notable feature,
constantly referred to in memoirs, had been the breakfast party. It had
before my time nearly, but had not quite, disappeared. It was so far
kept alive by Lord Houghton, at all events, that a breakfast at his
house in Bruton Street is one of my own early recollections. The repast
began at ten and lasted for half the morning. There must have been about
twenty guests. Two of them were "lions," whose hair was more remarkable
than their speech. The rest were men of some sort of social eminence,
who seemed to find the occasion not wholly congenial; and, in spite of
the efforts of the host, conversation had a tendency to languish till a
topic turned up which was then attracting public notice. This topic
roused one of the guests--a seasoned man of the world--from a mood of
apparent apathy into one of such humorous animation that soon the rest
of the company were holding their breaths to listen to him. The topic in
question was a volume of scandalous memoirs which had lately been
published by Rosina, wife of the first Lord Lytton, for the purpose of
attacking a husband from whom she had long been separated. The guest to
whom I am now alluding caught the attention of everybody by confessing
to an intimate acquaintance with the ways of this caustic lady, and
proceeded to illustrate them by a series of amusing anecdotes of which I
recollect the following:
Bulwer Lytton, as he then was, was candidate for one of the divisions of
Hertfordshire, and speeches were being delivered from the hustings by
supporters of local influence--among others by Lord Cowper. Lord Cowper
was still speaking when something appeared at his elbow in the likeness
of the candidate's wife. "Now, Billy Cowper," she said, "we've listened
to you long enough. Sit down, and let _me_ speak. You propose,
gentlemen, to send my husband to Parliament. I am here to tell you that
Parliament is not the proper place for him. His proper place," she said,
pointing to the ground, "is below; and when you have sent him there, he
will learn something of what he at present knows nothing. That something
is Justice."
On another occasion, speaking in more moderate tones, she observed to a
circle of acquaintances: "My husband is a man who has been born out of
his due time. He ought to have been born nineteen hundred years ago. Had
he been born then, he would have been Judas Iscariot. He would have
betrayed his Master; he would have taken the thirty pieces of silver;
but then he would not have hanged himself--far from it. He would have
sat down and written the Epistle to the Ephesians."
On another occasion she told the following story of him. He was, so she
said, in London, and she, having been left in the country, had written
to propose joining him. He had at once replied begging her not to do so,
but to leave him a little longer in the enjoyment of philosophic
solitude. "When I heard that"--so she confided to a friend--"I set off
for London instantly; and there I found him with Philosophic Solitude,
in white muslin, on his knee."
"Perhaps," added the narrator, "even less agreeable to the delinquent
would have been, had he heard it, her description of his physical
appearance. Alluding to the fact that his head was undoubtedly too large
for his body, she said, 'My husband has the head of a goat, and he has
the body of a grasshopper.'"
But of all the men who, in the way of conversational wit or otherwise,
figure in my memory as types of a now vanished generation, the most
remarkable still remains to be noticed. This was the second Duke of
Wellington. Even to those who knew him only by sight he was memorable,
on account of his astonishing likeness to the portraits or statues of
his father. He had not, or he had not chosen to cultivate, the talents
which mainly lead to distinction in public life, but by the small circle
of those who were intimate with him during his later days he was known
for a humor, a polished wit, and a shrewdness which made him, of all
possible companions, one of the most delightful. I knew him intimately
myself as far as my age permitted. I often stayed with him at
Strathfieldsaye, not only when he had parties, but also when, as
sometimes happened, we were together for a week alone. On these latter
occasions I had all the mornings to myself, and every afternoon I took
with him long walks, during which he poured forth his social or other
philosophies, or else told me stories of his father so pointed and
numerous that, had I written them down, I might then have compiled a
life of him which would form a very interesting supplement to those
which exist already. I never, in the course of these walks, experienced
a dull moment.
The only great entertainment at which I ever encountered him was a
dinner party of his own given at Apseley House. During one of such
visits which I paid him at Strathfieldsaye he told me that very soon he
would have to give a party in London in honor of the King of the
Belgians. The party was to be a large dinner, and he asked me to be one
of the company. The time arrived. The King of the Belgians for some
reason failed to come, but everything had been arranged in an
appropriate manner for his reception. As a spectacle the table was
noteworthy. It was covered with gold plate--a historic monument to the
great hero of Waterloo--which consisted of figures of soldiers, horses,
palm trees, camels, artillery, and other military objects symbolical of
his various campaigns; and gold plate at intervals all round the table
was supplemented by triumphal wreaths. The duke told me afterward that
all these decorations were due to his own forgetfulness. He had for
years been accustomed to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of
Waterloo by a banquet to certain officers who had been present at it,
and who still survived; but the number of these had already been so
reduced that he had determined to discontinue the celebration. In
fixing, however, a day for the dinner now in question, he had entirely
forgotten that the date ultimately chosen was none other than the day of
the great battle. His servants had concluded that, in honor of Belgian
royalty, he was giving one more repetition of the Waterloo banquets of
the past. Everything had been arranged accordingly; and I was thus
present at a function which will never take place again.
But it was not at such functions that his real character displayed
itself. This only came out in intercourse of a much more private kind,
as would happen at Strathfieldsaye when he entertained parties of not
more than ten people. When I was present on such occasions I was usually
the youngest--by far the youngest--member of the company. Of the rest I
may mention as examples Lady Dorothy Nevill, Alfred Montgomery, Sir
Hastings Doyle, Lord Calthorpe, Sir St. George Foley, Lady Chesterfield,
and Mr. Newtons, the courtly police magistrate, called by his friends
"The Beak." And here--to repeat in substance the observation which I
have made already--what always struck me was the far greater polish of
manner that prevailed among these my elders than any which was
cultivated among my own, the then rising, generation. In such an
atmosphere the Duke's special gifts were at home. He never strained
after effect. His words seemed to crystallize into wit or poignant humor
before he had time to reflect on what he was going to say. But these
qualities were perhaps seen at their best in tête-à-tête encounters or
correspondence. At all events, it is from such occurrences that
illustrations of them can be most readily drawn.
He had often spoken to me of his dislike of anything in the nature of
jobbery, and this was once brought out in a very characteristic way by a
passage at arms between himself and Lady St. Helier. Lady St. Helier had
written to him to ask him if, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, he would
make one of her friends a magistrate. The duke promptly replied that her
friend was an entire stranger to him, and that he never made
appointments of that kind as a favor to some third party. There the
matter rested for a week or two, at the end of which period she received
the following note from him:
DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.
You have treated me extremely ill. I have made inquiries about
your friend, and I find he is part-proprietor of--here he named
a certain place of amusement--which I learn is frequently used
as a place for assignations of a very reprehensible kind.
Lady St. Helier's immediate reply was this:
MY DEAR DUKE.
I have nothing more to say. You are acquainted with such
matters so much better than I am.
Not long afterward he met her on somebody's doorstep, and she, who was
taking her departure, greeted him with some slight frigidity. He merely
looked at her with a momentary twinkle in his eye, and said, "I think
you had me there." Some days later she received yet another letter from
him, which consisted of these words:
DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.
The deed is done. God forgive me.
A further encounter took place of something the same kind--the duke
himself told me of this--from which he emerged the victor. He had, he
said, received a letter from Lady Herbert of Lee, in which she begged
him to contribute £100 toward the total required for the restoration of
some Catholic church, and his answer had been as follows:
DEAR LADY HERBERT.
I shall be very happy to give you the sum you name, for a
purpose so excellent as yours. At the same time I may say that
I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at
Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by
sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money
need pass between us.
In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to
him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton.
When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had
begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental
column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to
the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and
intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work
farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present
day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the
credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to
the petitioners was, so he told me, this:
GENTLEMEN.
It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to
nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own
ingratitude.
Strathfieldsaye may have been in old days the scene of many political
incidents. The latest was one at which I myself was present. The heroine
of it was Miss Meresia Nevill, Lady Dorothy's daughter, who afterward
achieved renown as a luminary of the Primrose League. She was then in
her novitiate only, and the duke one morning whispered to her that he
would give her a lesson in oratory. I was asked to be present at it,
but otherwise it was to be strictly secret. Accordingly after breakfast
she, I, and the duke met by appointment in the library. The doors were
locked, and Miss Nevill, who had brought some memoranda with her
scribbled on a half-sheet of letter paper, was told by the duke to take
her stand on the hearth rug and give him a specimen of her powers by
declaiming what she proposed to say, he himself being seated on a sofa
watching her. "Now," he said, "begin." Bashfully consulting her notes,
and speaking with apologetic rapidity, Miss Nevill began to murmur, "My
lords, ladies and gentlemen." "No!" ejaculated the duke; "my dear young
lady, no! Mouth it out like this: "My lords--ladies--_and_--gentlemen."
Don't say it as if you were saying your prayers." In this humorous but
most admirable advice there was no great verbal brilliance; but his
tendency to verbal brilliance showed, on one occasion at all events, how
capable it was of translating itself into the highest form of literary
art. A favorite amusement of his was making translations from Horace.
Among the passages which had specially provoked this enterprise was one
the Latin of which is so terse and pungent that it has often been
pronounced untranslatable. It is the passage in which Horace describes
true happiness as that of the man who, looking back from to-morrow, is
able to say, "I was really alive all yesterday." Dryden's pithy version
of it is to the effect that the sole true happiness is that of the man:
Who, secure at eve, can say,
"To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day."
The duke's version was on a yet higher level than this, embodying in it
a concentrated pungency and a _curiosa felicitas_ which were quite in
the vein of Horace, but contain a thought not present in the original.
They were comprised in these few words:
Happy if only I enjoy
My rival's envy for a day.
It is true this specimen of the duke's wit in literature does not bear
directly on the question of wit in social conversation; and yet it may
lead the mind to questions which are very closely akin to it. The
felicity of the duke's translation has a very close resemblance to the
_curiosa felicitas_ of Pope--for instance, in his "Characters of Women"
and his celebrated satire on Addison. Nearly all Pope's satires are
addressed, if not to a small society, yet at all events to a small
public, and outside that limited body they would have neither vogue nor
meaning.
CHAPTER VII
VIGNETTES OF LONDON LIFE
Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son--The World of Balls--The
"Great Houses," and Their New Rivals--The Latter Criticized by
Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse--Types of More Serious
Society--Lady Marian Alford and Others--_Salons_ Exclusive and
Inclusive--A Clash of Two Rival Poets--The Poet Laureate
--Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life--Dean Stanley--Whyte
Melville--"Ouida"--"Violet Fane"--Catholic Society--Lord
Bute--Banquet to Cardinal Manning--Difficulties of the
Memoir-writer--Lord Wemyss and Lady P---- --Indiscretions of
Augustus Hare--Routine of a London Day--The Author's Life Out
of London
The few portraits and anecdotes which I have just sketched or recorded
are sufficient, let me say once more, to illustrate two general facts.
They indicate the way in which society owes much of its finer polish to
it. They emphasize the fact that, when I first knew it myself, it was
very much smaller than it has since then become, and, though divided
into sections even then, was very much more cohesive. Let me pass from
this latter fact to some of my own experiences as connected with it.
For young men who are already equipped with influential friends or
connections, a society which is relatively small and more or less
cohesive is in some ways more easy of access than one which is more
numerous, but in which, unless their means are ample enough to excite
the competitive affection of mothers, they are more likely to be lost.
In this respect I may look on myself as fortunate, for my circle of
acquaintances very rapidly widened as soon as, having done with Oxford,
I began to stay in London for more than a week at a time, and secured a
habitation, more or less permanent, of my own. While I was first looking
about for one which I thought would be suitable, Wentworth returned the
hospitality which I had previously shown him at Oxford by putting me up
for a fortnight at his house on the Chelsea Embankment, and during this
visit an incident took place which, if merely judged by the names of the
few persons concerned in it, might be thought picturesquely memorable.
Students of Robert Browning may recollect a short poem of his which
begins with the following lines:
And did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you answer him again?
How strange it seems and true!
My own answer would be, I did not see Shelley plain, but I did the next
thing to it. Sir Percy and Lady Shelley--the poet's son and
daughter-in-law--were Wentworth's near neighbors, though he never had
met either of them. Lady Shelley had been an old friend of my mother's,
and I took him one day to tea with her. To the wife of Shelley's son I
introduced Byron's grandson. What event could seem more thrilling to
any one whose sentiments were attuned to the music of Browning's verses?
What really happened was this: Lady Shelley said to me some pleasant
things about my mother; we all of us lamented the prevalence of the east
wind, and then, having recommended her crumpets, she discussed with
Wentworth the various large houses lately built in the neighborhood. At
this juncture the drawing-room door opened and the son of the author of
"Prometheus Unbound" entered. He was a fresh-looking country gentleman,
whose passion was private theatricals. Close to his own house he had
built a little private theater, and the conversation turned
thenceforward on the question of whether a license would be necessary if
the public were admitted by payment to witness the performance of a
farce in the interest of some deserving charity.
By the time I left Wentworth's roof I had arranged to share with two
Catholic friends a suite of rooms at a private hotel in Dover Street.
Both belonged to well-known Catholic families, and had ready access to
the world of Catholic gayety, especially in so far as this was
represented by balls. One of them, through his skill as a dancer and his
buoyant vivacity in conversation, was in much wider request. By the
agency of Augustus Savile and others--of "social fairies" (as Lord
Beaconsfield called them), such as the Duchess of Sutherland, whom I had
known well at Torquay--cards for balls and parties, in quickly
increasing numbers, found their way to myself likewise; while in other
directions doors were opened also which led to a world of a more serious
aspect and character.
Of balls I need say little except to observe that I went to a great
many, and so far followed the advice of Lady E---- of T---- that I did
not often find myself at a ball "in a two-roomed house." For this the
principal reason was that, even from my childhood, I was wanting in any
inclination to dance, and thus preferred many-roomed houses in which
persons who were so disposed could sit out and converse, the very fact
that a ball was in progress being hardly so much as perceptible. In this
connection I may observe that, during my earlier days, the principal
balls were still to a certain extent those which were given in houses
famous for their traditions and their magnitude, such as Devonshire
House, Bridgwater House, Stafford House, and so forth; but already
things were in this respect changing. Newly established families, or
families in the act of establishing themselves, had begun to outdo the
"great houses" in their lavish expenditure on this kind of
entertainment. The center of social gravity was in this respect being
shifted. As an illustration of this fact I remember some curt
observations made by two ladies who were in the act of bringing out
their daughters. Both belonged to families of historical and high
distinction, but their means were not equal to their dignity. One of
them said, "If I want to take out my daughter, I have generally to go
to the house of someone who is not a gentleman." Another said: "I don't
care for London any longer. It seems that the only people who are giving
balls to-day are people whose proper business would be to black my
boots." Utterances of this kind, though of course greatly exaggerated,
were straws which showed the direction in which the wind was blowing.
Let me turn from the world of balls to a _milieu_ which is less
frivolous, and take certain ladies as types of tendencies which then
prevailed in it. It will be enough to mention four, whose houses
represented society as, in some ways, at its best. I refer to Mrs.
William Lowther, Lady Marian Alford, Louisa, Lady Ashburton (whom I thus
group together because their isolated and commanding dwellings stood
practically in the same row), and Lady Somers. All these were women of
the highest cultivation. They were devoted to art. Mrs. Lowther was
herself an artist. Mrs. Lowther and Lady Ashburton, though thorough
women of the world with regard to their mundane company, were remarkable
for a grave philanthropy which they sacrificed much to practice. Indeed
at some of their entertainments it was not easy to tell where society
ended and high thinking began. This could not be said of Lady Somers or
of Lady Marian. Though in artistic and intellectual taste they equaled
the three others, the guests whom they collected about them were
essentially chosen with a view to the social charm which wit, manners,
or beauty enabled them, as if by magic, to communicate to the passing
moment. And here it may be observed conversely that in a world like that
of London the art of society depends not on choice only, but also, and
no less, on an equally careful rejection, and is for that reason beset
by peculiar and varying difficulties. Of these difficulties Lady Marian
herself once spoke to me. They had, she said, been lately brought home
to her by certain of her friends who had been urging her to give a
ball--a suggestion which, for the following reasons, she found herself
unwilling to entertain. "It is impossible," she said, "to give a
successful ball in London without being very ill-natured to a large
number of people. Many of those who would think they had a right to be
asked would--though on other occasions no doubt welcome enough--be as
much out of place in a ballroom as a man would be in a boat race who
could not handle an oar." But she was, so she added, going to make an
attempt at reviving a kind of entertainment to which no such
difficulties would attach themselves. During the months of the coming
winter she proposed to send out cards to all her more intimate
acquaintances; announcing that she would always be at home after dinner
on a certain day each week, and begging them to give her their company
whenever, and as often as, they pleased. A certain number of people--all
of them agreeable and distinguished--responded to this appeal; but
their number rarely exceeded fifteen or twenty, and Lady Marian was at
length bound to admit that the competitive attractions developed by the
enlargement of social life were such as to render a revival of the
_salon_ impossible, even among acquaintances so carefully chosen as her
own.
I may, however, advert to another lady who in a certain sense succeeded
where Lady Marian failed; but she succeeded by basing her _salon_ on a
noticeably different principle--namely, that of inclusion, whereas that
of Lady Marian was selection. The passport to her drawing-rooms was
fame--even fame of the most momentary kinds--and as fame is the meed of
very various activities, not all her own charm was sufficient on some
occasions to prevent her company from being a clash of illustrious
rivals rather than a _reunion_ of friends.
Of a clash of this kind I was once myself a witness, though nobody at
the moment divined that there was a clash at all. The scene was not in
London, but at the lady's house in the country, where a few guests were
staying with her for the inside of a week. Two of these guests were
poets; we may call them Sir E. and Sir L. The visit coincided with the
time of Tennyson's last illness, the reports of which became daily more
alarming. The two poets evinced much becoming anxiety, though this did
not interfere with the zeal with which one day at luncheon they consumed
a memorable plum tart. Next morning neither of them appeared at
breakfast; and when both of them remained in their bedrooms for the
larger part of the day I came to the prosaic conclusion that the plum
tart had been too much for them. Next morning came the news of
Tennyson's death. The two bards remained in their cells till noon, after
which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The
true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when
each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected,
was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which
the country had just suffered--compositions implying a suggestion on the
part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to
repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed.
Our hostess and the other guests saw them off at the station, and as the
train went on, the elegists were seen waving independent adieux, one
from a first, the other from a third-class carriage. The successor to
the late Laureate was Mr. Alfred Austin.
I knew Alfred Austin well; and a few words with regard to him may not be
inappropriate here. Though his poetry has not commanded any very wide
attention, he had more of true poetry in him than many people imagine.
He had all the qualifications of a really great poet except a sustained
faculty for writing really good poetry. He had a sound philosophic
conception of what the scope and functions of great poetry are; and it
would be possible to select from his works isolated passages of high and
complete beauty. But, if judged by his poetry as a whole, he seems to
have been so indolent or so deficient in the faculty of self-criticism
that for the most part he suffered himself to be content with language
which resembled an untuned piano, his performances on which were often
calculated to affront the attention of his audience rather than to
arrest and capture it. He once or twice asked me to make his works the
subject of a critical and comprehensive essay. With some diffidence I
consented, and accomplished this delicate task by picking out a number
of his best and most carefully finished passages, which showed what he
could do if he tried, and how far by pure carelessness he elsewhere fell
short of the standard which he himself had set. For example, from his
"Human Tragedy" I quoted the following lines, one of which refers to
Rome as a place where "Papal statues arrogantly wave"; while in another,
describing a headlong stream, he says with the utmost complacency that:
The cascade
Bounded adown the cataract.
I pointed out that no conceivable feat was so absolutely impossible for
a statue as that of "waving," and that, a cataract and a cascade being
practically the same thing, it was impossible that the former could
manage to bound down the latter. My practical moral, as addressed to
the Laureate, was, "Be just to yourself, and the public will be just to
you," and the compliment implied in one part of this criticism did much
to mitigate the unwelcome tenor of the other.
Many interesting people I used to meet at the house of Mr. Froude the
historian. Among these were two relatives of Mr. Froude's second
wife--namely, Henry Cowper, one of the most charming conversationalists
of his time, Lady Florence Herbert, and, through her, her well-known
husband, Auberon. Auberon Herbert was a most singular character. He
represented a movement of thought which has since then taken other
directions, and would probably now be associated with some form or other
of socialism. In one sense he was certainly no socialist. On the
contrary, he was an ardent champion of individual freedom, as opposed to
the tyranny of the state. He even contended that all taxation should be
voluntary, and actually started a journal, mainly written by himself, in
support of this agreeable doctrine. He was, however, yet more
pertinacious as an advocate of what is now called "the simple life." His
wife shared, though she slightly perhaps tempered, his opinions; and
when they first set up house together they insisted that all their
household--the domestics included--should dine at the same table. After
a week's experience, however, of this regime, the domestics all gave
warning, and the establishment was reconstructed on a more conventional
footing. This counter-revolution had been accomplished before I knew
him, and my intimate acquaintance with him began at a great shooting
party given at Highclere Castle by Lord Carnarvon, his brother. Neither
I nor he were shooters, and while battues were in progress, and guns
were sounding daily at no very great distance, he walked me about the
park, declaring that modern castles which stood for nothing but the
slaughter of half-tame birds were examples of a civilization completely
gone astray. In order that I might see what, shorn of its earlier
eccentricities, was his personal ideal of a reasonably ordered life, he
asked me to stay with him for a week at his own home, Ashley Arnewood,
in Hampshire, on the borders of New Forest. In due time I went. His
dwelling among the woodlands was of very simple construction. It was a
small farmhouse bisected by a flagged passage giving access to four
rooms. On the right as one entered was a kitchen, on the left was an
apartment which he dignified by the name of a museum, its sole contents
being fragments of ancient British pottery which had been dug up in the
neighborhood and were here carefully arranged on a large disused mangle.
Beyond, and opposite to one another, were a dining room so limited in
size that one end of the table abutted on a whitewashed wall, and a
sitting room, luxuriously warm, which was furnished with several deep
and remarkably comfortable chairs. The carpets consisted of rough
coconut matting, and draughts in the bedrooms were excluded by rough
red blankets, which did duty as curtains. The evening repast was almost
obtrusively a tea rather than a dinner, though, in deference to my own
presumably unconverted appetite, I, and I alone, was provided with some
kind of meat. I could not help feeling at times that for my host and
hostess alike this practice of "the simple life" represented a sacrifice
to their principles rather than a complete enjoyment of them, for on
several occasions before bedtime they both confessed to a sensation of
acute hunger, and made an expedition to some mysterious region from
which they returned with substantial parallelograms of bread.
Through the Antony Froudes I also made acquaintance with Lecky, whose
nervous shyness in conversation was in curious contrast to his weighty
style as a writer, and also with Dean Stanley and Whyte Melville the
novelist. Between the two latter there might seem to be little
connection, but I was asked to meet them at a little dinner of four,
Whyte Melville being specially anxious to ask the Dean's advice. This
was not, however, advice of any spiritual kind. Whyte Melville was
thoroughly at home in the social world and the hunting field, and had
made himself a great name as an accurate describer of both, but he was
now ambitious of achieving renown in a new territory. He was planning a
novel, _Sarchedon_, a story of the ancient East, and was anxious to
learn from the Dean what historical authorities would best guide the
Homer of Melton and Market Harborough in reconstructing the world of Bel
and Baylon.
In speaking of novels I am led on to mention an authoress whose fame was
concurrent with Whyte Melville's, and whose visions of modern society
were not altogether unlike his own visions of Babylonia. This authoress
was "Ouida." Ouida lived largely in a world of her own creation, peopled
with foreign princesses, mysterious dukes--masters of untold millions,
and of fabulous English guardsmen whose bedrooms in Knightsbridge
Barracks were inlaid with silver and tortoise shell. And yet such was
her genius that she invested this phantom world with a certain semblance
of life, and very often with a certain poetry also. In some respects she
was even more striking than her books. In her dress and in her manner of
life she was an attempted exaggeration of her own female characters. For
many years she occupied a large villa near Florence. During that time
she visited London once. There it was that I met her. She depicted
herself to herself as a personage of European influence, and imagined
herself charged with a mission to secure the appointment of Lord Lytton
as British Ambassador in Paris. With this purpose in view she called one
day on Lady Salisbury, who, never having seen her before, was much
amazed by her entrance, and was still more amazed when Ouida, in
confidential tones, said, "I have come to tell you that the one man for
Paris is Robert." Lady Salisbury's answer was not very encouraging. It
consisted of the question, "And pray, if you please, who is Robert?" In
a general way, however, she received considerable attention, and might
have received more if it had not been for her reckless ignorance of the
complexities of the London world. In whatever company she might be in,
her first anxiety was to ingratiate herself with the most important
members of it, but she was constantly making mistakes as to who the most
important members were. Thus, as one of her entertainers--"Violet
Fane"--told me, Ouida was sitting after dinner between Mrs. ----, the
mistress of one of the greatest houses in London, and a vulgar little
Irish peeress who was only present on sufferance. Ouida treated the
former with the coldest and most condescending inattention, and devoted
every smile in her possession to an intimate worship of the latter.
When, however, she was in companies so carefully chosen that everybody
present was worthy of her best attention, and so small that all were
willing to give their best attention to _her_, she showed herself, so I
was told, a most agreeable woman. Thus forewarned as to her ways, I
found that such was the fact. I gave for her benefit a little luncheon
party at the Bachelors' Club, the only guests whom I asked to meet her
being Philip Stanhope and Countess Tolstoy (now Lord and Lady Weardale),
Lord and Lady Blythswood, and Julia, Lady Jersey. Ouida arrived trimmed
with the most exuberant furs, which, when they were removed, revealed
a costume of primrose color--a costume so artfully cut that, the moment
she sat down, all eyes were dazzled by the sparkling of her small
protruded shoes. In a word, she quite looked the part, and, perceiving
the impression she had made, was willing to be gracious to everybody. As
we were going upstairs to the luncheon room, this effect was completed.
Lady Jersey laid a caressing hand on her shoulder and said: "You must go
first. The entertainment is in honor of you." Ouida was here at her
best. No one could have been more agreeable and less affected than she.
[Illustration: Ouida]
Her latter years were overclouded by poverty. This was due to her almost
mad extravagance--to her constant attempts, in short, to live up to the
standards of her own heroines. Had she acted like a sensible woman, she
might have realized a very fair fortune. She had many appreciative
friends, who gave her considerable sums to relieve her at various times
from the pressure of financial difficulties; but they realized in the
end that to do this was like pouring water into a sieve. Somebody gave
her £250 in London to enable her to pay her hotel bill; but before a
week was over she had lavished more than a hundred in turning her
sitting room at the Langham Hotel into a glade of the most expensive
flowers. She died, in what was little better than a peasant's cottage,
at Lucca. Among the ladies to whom she had been introduced in London
was Winifred, Lady Howard of Glossop. A year or so later Ouida wrote me
a letter from Florence, saying, "Your name has been just recalled to me
by seeing in the _Morning Post_ that you were dining the other night
with Lady Howard of Glossop, one of my oldest friends." This is an
example of the way in which her imagination enabled her to live in a
fabric of misplaced facts, for the person through whom she became
acquainted with Lady Howard was none other than myself. The next letter
I had from her was to say that she was dedicating one of her later
books--a volume of essays--to me. The letter did not reach me till after
many delays, and I often regret the fact that before I was able, or
remembered, to answer it she was dead.
Another authoress well known to me, of whom I have made mention already,
was the beautiful "Violet Fane," who, under that pseudonym, published
many volumes of poetry. Her actual name was Mrs. Singleton. She
afterward became Lady Currie. I first knew her before my London days
began, and I dedicated _The New Republic_ to her. She was the center of
a group of intimates, of whom those who survive must connect her with
many of their happiest hours. No one could have combined in a way more
winning than hers the discriminations of fashionable life with an inborn
passion for poetry. She was perfect in features, slight as a sylph in
figure, and her large dark eyes alternately gleamed with laughter and
were grave as though she were listening for a voice from some vague
beyond. Many of her phrases, when she was speaking of social matters,
were like rapiers with the tip of which, as though by accident, she
would just touch the foibles of her nearest and dearest friends, the
result being a delicate puncture rather than the infliction of a wound.
She first became known as a poetess by a small volume of lyrics called
_From Dawn to Noon_, in which, if, as some say, poetry be
self-revelation, her success, according to certain of her censors, was
somewhat too complete. The same criticism was provoked by her second
volume, _Denzil Place_, a novel in blank verse interwoven with songs.
Whatever her censors may have said about it, this, from first to last,
was a work of real inspiration. Few who have read it will have forgotten
the song beginning:
You gave to me on that dear night of parting
So much, so little; and yet everything,
or will have failed to recognize the musical ear of one who has given us
the liquid melody of two such lines as these:
The tremulous convolvulus whose closing blue eye misses
The faint shadow on the dial that foretells the evening hour.
At all events, whatever her merits as a poetess, she was something like
a living poem for a certain group of friends, of whom I happened to be
one. This group comprised men such as Wilfrid Blunt, Lord Lytton,
Philip Currie, Hamilton Aidé, Frederick Locker, Clair Vyner, Sir Baldwin
Leighton, and others, all of whom had in them a natural appreciation of
poetry, while some of them were poets themselves. With a more or less
intimate, though loosely formed, group like this my memory associates
many small gatherings, which generally took the form of dinners, either
at "Violet Fane's" own house in Grosvenor Place, or at Hurlingham, or at
the "Star and Garter," or at Vyner's house among its gardens and woods
at Combe, where we would linger, forgetful of time, and feeling no
inclination to join any larger company.
But of all the worlds which, within the world, were more or less
self-cohesive and separate, that in which I felt myself most at home was
the Catholic. At any entertainment given at a Catholic house the bulk of
the guests--perhaps three-fourths of them--would be Catholics. These
would be people so closely connected with one another by blood or by
lifelong acquaintance as to constitute one large family. Well-born,
well-bred, and distinguished by charming and singularly simple manners,
they were content to be what they were, and the Darwinian competition
for merely fashionable or intellectual brilliance, however prevalent
elsewhere, was, with few exceptions, to them virtually unknown. Yet
whenever anything in the way of formal pomp was necessary, they were
fully equal to the occasion. The well-known dinners given by Mrs.
Washington Hibbert, at which four-and-twenty guests would be seated
round a huge circular table, would fill Hill Street with swaying family
coaches, on whose hammercloths crests and coronets maintained an
eighteenth-century magnitude which the modern world was abandoning,
while on certain ecclesiastical occasions Catholic society could exhibit
a stateliness even more conspicuous.
On one of these latter occasions I was, as well as I can remember, the
only non-Catholic in the company. This was a great luncheon party given
by the then Lord Bute in honor of Cardinal Manning. Lord Bute, who was
in many ways the most learned of the then recent converts to
Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of _Lothair_ in Lord
Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was
disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the
tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart
from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable
likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart
from its peculiar sequel, like a page of _Lothair_ translating itself
into actual life.
The Butes were at that time living at Chiswick House, which they rented
from the Duke of Devonshire. The house is a good example of that
grandiose classicality which we associate with the eighteenth century,
and the saloon in which the guests were assembled provided them with an
appropriate background. They were something like thirty in number, and
comprised some of the greatest of the then great Catholic ladies. Lord
Beaconsfield himself could not have chosen them better. Indeed his Lady
St. Jerome was actually there in person. When I entered there was a good
deal of talking, and yet at the same time there was something like a
hush. I divined, and divined correctly, that the Cardinal had not yet
arrived. The minutes went slowly on; the appointed hour was past. At
length a sound was heard which seemed to emanate from an anteroom, and
presently a figure was solemnly gliding forward--a figure slight,
emaciated, and habited in a long black cassock. This was relieved at the
throat by one peeping patch of purple, and above the throat was a face
the delicate sternness of which was like semitransparent ivory. The
company parted, making way for the great Churchman, and then a scene
enacted itself which cannot be better described than in the words
written many years previously by the author of _Lothair_ himself. "The
ladies did their best to signalize what the Cardinal was and what he
represented, by reverences which a posture-master might have envied and
certainly could not have surpassed. They seemed to sink into the earth,
and slowly and supernaturally to emerge."
When the banquet was over, and the guests were taking their departure,
our host begged me to remain, so that he and I and the Cardinal might
have a little conversation by ourselves. We were presently secreted in
a small room or closet, and our little talk must have lasted till close
upon six o'clock. I half thought for a moment that this might be a
planned arrangement so that then and there I might be received into the
Roman fold. Matters, however, took a very different course. Under the
Cardinal's guidance the conversation almost immediately--how and why I
cannot remember--turned to the subject of Spiritualism, and he soon was
gravely informing us that, of all the signs of the times, none was more
sinister than the multiplication of Spiritualist séances, which were,
according to him, neither more nor less than revivals of black magic. He
went on to assert, as a fact supported by ample evidence, that the devil
at such meetings assumed a corporeal form--sometimes that of a man,
sometimes that of a beautiful and seductive woman, the results being
frequent births, in the prosaic world around us, of terrible hybrid
creatures half diabolic in nature, though wholly human in form. On this
delicate matter he descanted in such unvarnished language that the
details of what he said cannot well be repeated here. Of the truth of
his assertions he obviously entertained no doubt and such was his dry,
almost harsh solemnity in making them that, as I listened, I could
hardly believe my ears. Our host, though a model of strictly Catholic
devoutness, was, so he told me with a smile when the Cardinal had taken
his departure, affected very much as I was. The impression left on both
of us was that, in the Cardinal's character, there must have been a
vein of almost astounding credulity--a credulity which would account for
the readiness with which, as a social reformer, he adopted on many
occasions the wildest exaggerations of agitators.
I was subsequently invited to call on him at the Archbishop's house in
Westminster. During the interview which ensued he revealed intellectual
qualities very different from those which had elicited a furtive smile
even from a Catholic such as his host at Chiswick. We spent most of the
morning in discussing the ultimate difficulties, philosophical,
historical, and scientific, which preclude the modern mind from an
assent to the philosophy of Catholicism. He displayed on this occasion,
a broadness and a balance, if not a profundity of thought, in which many
theologians who call themselves liberals are wanting. He spoke even of
militant atheists, such as Huxley and Tyndall, without any sarcastic
anger or signs of moral reprobation. He spoke of their opinions, not as
sins which demanded chastisement, but simply as intellectual errors
which must be cured by intellectual refutation, rather than by moral
anathemas, and the personal relations subsisting between him and them
were relations--so I have always understood--of mutual amity and
respect.
[Illustration: CARDINAL MANNING]
Of another prominent Catholic, Wilfrid Ward, the same thing may be said.
As a Catholic apologist he was a model of candor and suavity. He was,
moreover, a most agreeable man of the world, among his accomplishments
being that of an admirable mimic. He was, however, best known as an
exponent of Catholic liberalism; and, since I am here concerned only
with recollections of social life, to dwell on him longer would carry me
too far astray.
Out of this last observation there naturally arises another, which
relates to anecdotes or short sketches of individuals as a method of
social history. For certain reasons the scope of this method is limited.
In the first place, the persons whose doings or sayings are commemorated
must be persons who, by their position or reputation, are more or less
self-explanatory to the ear of the general reader. They will otherwise
for the general reader have very little significance. They must also for
the most part be dead, so that their susceptibilities may not be wounded
by a too free allusion to their doings. Further, the anecdotes told of
them must not be to their disadvantage in any way which would wound the
susceptibilities of the living. These mortifying restrictions are, for
all those who respect them, a deathblow to the most entertaining,
perhaps the most instructive, part of what the memoir-writer has to
tell. During the last ten years of his life the late Lord Wemyss amused
himse
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