A New Medley of Memories
by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair · English · Gutenberg #36700 · 503,796 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A New Medley of Memories
Author: Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair
Release date: July 11, 2011 [eBook #36700]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36700
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Oswald Hunter Blair]
A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES
BY THE
RIGHT REV. SIR DAVID HUNTER-BLAIR
BT., O.S.B., M.A.
TITULAR ABBOT OF DUNFERMLINE
WITH PORTRAIT
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD & CO.
1922
[_All rights reserved_]
TO THE
MASTER AND SCHOLARS
OF
SAINT BENET'S HALL, OXFORD,
IN MEMORY OF
TEN HAPPY YEARS.
{vii}
FOREWORD
Some kindly critics of my _Medley of Memories_, and not a few private
correspondents (most of them unknown to me) have been good enough to
express a lively hope that I would continue my reminiscences down to a
later date than the year 1903, when I closed the volume with my jubilee
birthday.
It is in response to this wish that I have here set down some of my
recollections of the succeeding decade, concluding with the outbreak of
the Great War.
One is rather "treading on eggshells" when printing impressions of
events and persons so near our own time. But I trust that there is
nothing unkind in these more recent memories, any more than in the
former. There should not be; for I have experienced little but
kindness during a now long life; and I approach the Psalmist's limit of
days with only grateful sentiments towards the many friends who have
helped to make that life a happy as well as a varied one.
DAVID O. HUNTER-BLAIR, O.S.B.
S. Paulo, Brazil,
_March_, 1922.
{ix}
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I.--1903-1904.
The Premier Duke--Oxford Chancellorship--A Silver Jubilee--In
Canterbury Close--Hyde Park Oratory--Oxford under Water--"Twopence
each" at Christ Church--Church Music--Gregorian Centenary in
Rome--Pope Pius X.--Pilgrims and Autograph--Cradle of the
Benedictine Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II.--1904.
"Sermons from Stones"--_Alcestis_ at Bradfield--Whimsical
Texts--Old Masters at Ushaw--A Mozart-Wagner Festival--Bismarck
and William II.--"Longest Word" Competition--Medal-week at
St. Andrews--Oxford Rhodes Scholars--Liddell and Scott--Lord
Rosebery at the Union--Oxford Portraits--Wytham
Abbey--Christmas in Bute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
CHAPTER III.--1905.
A "Catholic Demonstration"--Boy-prodigies--Spring Days in
Naples--"C.-B." at Oxford--Medical Sceptics--Blenheim
Hospitality--A Scoto-Irish Wedding--Dunskey
Transformed--Lunatics up-to-date--Eton War Memorial--Four
Thousand Guests at Arundel--At Exton Park--Abbotsford and
Blairquhan--Lothair's Bride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
CHAPTER IV.--1905-1906.
Modern Gothic--Contrasts in South Wales--Chamberlain's Last
Speech--A Catholic Dining-club--Lovat Scouts' Memorial--A Tory
_debacle_--Hampshire Marriages--On the _Cote d'Azur_--Three
Weddings--An Old Irish Peer--Guernsey in June--A Coming of Age
on the Cotswolds--The Warwick Pageant--Bank Holiday at
Scarborough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
CHAPTER V.--1906-1907.
Melrose and Westminster--Newman Memorial Church--The Evil
Eye--Catholic Scholars at Oxford--Grace before Meat--A
Literary Dinner--A Jamaica Tragedy--An Abbatial
Blessing--Deaths of Oxford friends--Robinson Ellis--A Genteel
Watering-place--Visit to Dover--Pageants at Oxford and
Bury--Hugh Benson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
CHAPTER VI.--1907-1908.
Benedictine Honours at Oxford--Anecdotes from Sir
Hubert--Everingham and Bramham--Early Rising--Mass in a
Deer-forest--A Bishop's Visiting-cards--A Miniature College--Our
New Chancellor--Bodley's Librarian--Dean Burgon--A Welsh
Bishop--Illness and Convalescence--H.M.S. _Victory_ . . . . . . 94
{x}
CHAPTER VII.--1908.
Miss Broughton at Oxford--Notable Trees--An Infantile
Rest-cure--Equestrians from Italy--"The Colours"--A
Parson's Statistics--Two Anxious Mammas--"Let us Kill
Something"--Scottish Dessert--A Highland Bazaar--I Resign
Mastership of Hall--Notes on Newman--Scriptural
Heraldry--Myres Macership--Scots Catholic Judge--At a
_chateau_ in Picardy--Excursions from Oxford--St. Andrew's
Day at Cardiff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
CHAPTER VIII.--1908-1909.
Christmas at Beaufort--_Annus mirabilis_--Kenelm Vaughan--A
"Heathen Turk"--Sven Hedin--Centenary of Darwin--Oxford
and Louvain--Hugh Cecil on the House of Commons--Arundel
itself again--The Bridegroom's Father weeps--Cambridge
Fisher Society--Bodleian Congestion--Shackleton at Albert
Hall--Oakamoor, Faber, and Pugin--Welsh Pageant--Hampton
Court--Father Hell and Mr. Dams!--A Bishop's
Portrait--Gleann Mor Gathering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
CHAPTER IX.--1909-1910.
The White Garden at Beaufort--Andrew Lang--A Holy Well--The
new Ladycross--"My terrible Great-uncle!"--Off to
Brazil---King's Birthday on Board---The New City
Beautiful--Arrival at S. Paulo---An Abbey
Rebuilding--Cosmopolitan State and City--College of S.
Bento--Stray Englishmen--Progressive Paulistas--Education in
Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
CHAPTER X.--1910.
Provost Hornby--Christmas in Brazil--Architecture in S.
Paulo--The Snake-farm--Guests at the Abbey--End of the
Isolation of Fort Augustus--A Benedictine Festival--Sinister
Italians--Death of Edward VII.--Brazilian Funerals--Popular
Devotion--"Fradesj estrangeiros"--Football in the
Tropics--Homeward Voyage--Santos and Madeira--Sir John Benn . . 170
CHAPTER XI.--1910-1911.
A Wiesbaden Eye Klinik--The Rhine in Rain--Cologne and
Brussels--Wedding in the Hop-Country--The New Departure at
Fort Augustus--St. Andrew's without Angus--Oxford
Again--Highland Marriage at Oratory--One Eye _versus_
Two--Cambridge _versus_ Oxford---A Question of Colour--Ex-King
Manuel--A Great Church at Norwich--_Ave Verum_ in the
Kirk--Fort Augustus Post-bag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
CHAPTER XII.--1911.
Monks and Salmon--FitzAlan Chapel--April on Thames-side--My
sacerdotal Jubilee--Kinemacolor--Apparition at an
Abbey--St. Lucius--Faithful Highlanders--Hay Centenary--Nuns
for S. Paulo--A Brief Marriage Ceremony--Pagan
Mass-music--Seventeen New Cardinals--Doune Castle--A Quest
for our Abbey Church--Great Coal Strike--at Stonyhurst and
Ware--Katherine Howard--Twentieth-Century Chinese--An
Anglo-Italian Abbey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
{xi}
CHAPTER XIII.--1912-1913.
A Concert for Cripples--Queen Amelie--May at Aix-les-Bains--A
Sample Savoyards--Hautecombe--A "Picture of the Year"--A
Benedictine O.T.C.--Pugin's "Blue Pencil"--My nomination
as Prior--Fort Augustus and the Navy--Work in the
Monastery--Ladies in the Enclosure--A Bishop's Jubilee--A
Modern Major Pendennis--My Election to Abbacy--Installation
Ceremonies--Empress Eugenie at Farnborough--A Week at Monte
Cassino--Fatiguing Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
CHAPTER XIV.--1913-1914.
St Anselm's, Rome--Election of a Primate--My Uncle's
Grave--Milan and Maredsous--Canterbury Revisited--An Oratorian
Festival--Poetical Bathos--A Benedictine Chapter--King of
Uganda at Fort Augustus--Threefold Work of our Abbey--Funeral
of Bishop Turner--Bute Chapel at Westminster--A
Patriarchal Lay-brother--Abbot Gasquet a Cardinal--Corpus
Christi at Arundel--Eucharistic Congress at Cardiff--The Great
War--Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
APPENDIX I. _Novissima Verba_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
II. Darwin's _Credo_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
{1}
A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES
CHAPTER I
1903-1904
I take up again the thread of these random recollections in the autumn
of 1903, the same autumn in which I kept my jubilee birthday at St.
Andrews. I went from there successively to the Herries' at Kinharvie,
the Ralph Kerrs at Woodburn, near Edinburgh, and the Butes at
Mountstuart, meeting, curiously enough, at all three places Norfolk and
his sister, Lady Mary Howard--though it was not so curious after all,
as the Duke was accustomed to visit every autumn his Scottish relatives
at these places, as well as the Loudouns in their big rather
out-at-elbows castle in Ayrshire. He had no taste at all either for
shooting, fishing, or riding, or for other country pursuits such as
farming, forestry, or the like; but he made himself perfectly happy
during these country house visits. The least exacting of guests, he
never required to be amused, contenting himself with a game of croquet
(the only outdoor game he favoured), an occasional long walk, and a
daily romp with his young relatives, the children of the house, who
were all devoted to him. He read the newspapers perfunctorily, {2} but
seldom opened a book: he knew and cared little for literature, science,
or art, with the single exception of architecture, in which he was
keenly interested. The most devout of Catholics, he was nothing of an
ecclesiologist: official and hereditary chief of the College of Arms,
he was profoundly uninterested in heraldry, whether practically or
historically:[1] the head of the nobility of England, he was so little
of a genealogist that he was never at pains to correct the
proof--annually submitted to him as to others--of the preposterous
details of his pedigree as set forth in the pages of "Burke." I seem
to be describing an ignoramus; but the interesting thing was that the
Duke, with all his limitations, was really nothing of the kind. He
could, and did, converse on a great variety of subjects in a very
clear-headed and intelligent way; there was something engaging about
his utter unpretentiousness and deference to the opinions of others;
and he had mastered the truth that the secret of successful
conversation is to talk about what interests the other man and not what
interests oneself. No one could, in fact, talk to the Duke much, or
long, without getting to love him; and every one who came into contact
with him in their several degrees, from princes and prelates and
politicians to cabmen and crossing-sweepers, did love him. "His Grace
'as a good 'eart, that's what 'e 'as," said the old lady who used to
keep the crossing nearly opposite Norfolk House, and sat against the
railings {3} with her cat and her clean white apron (I think she did
her sweeping by deputy); "he'll never cross the square, whatever 'urry
'e's in, without saying a kind word to me." One sees him striding down
Pall Mall in his shabby suit, one gloveless hand plucking at his black
beard, the other wagging in constant salutation of passing friends, and
his kind brown eyes peering from under the brim of a hat calculated to
make the late Lord Hardwicke turn in his grave. A genuine
man--earnest, simple, affable, sincere, and yet ducal too; with a
certain grave native dignity which sat strangely well on him, and on
which it was impossible ever to presume. Panoplied in such dignity
when occasion required, as in great public ceremonies, our homely
little Duke played his part with curious efficiency; and it was often
remarked that in State pageants the figure of the Earl Marshal was
always one of the most striking in the splendid picture.
The only country seat which the premier Duke owned besides Arundel
Castle was Derwent Hall, a fine old Jacobean house in the Derwent
valley, on the borders of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. The Duke had lent
this place for some years past to his only brother as his country
residence (he later bequeathed it to him by will); and herein this same
autumn I paid a pleasant visit to Lord and Lady Edmund Talbot, on my
way south to Oxford. In London I went to see the rich and sombre
chapel of the Holy Souls just finished in Westminster Cathedral, at the
expense of my old friend Mrs. Walmesley (nee Weld Blundell). The
Archbishop's white marble _cathedra_ was in course of erection in the
sanctuary, and preparations were going forward {4} for his
enthronement.[2] Eight immense pillars of onyx were lying on the
floor, and the great painted rood leaned against the wall. I was glad
to see some signs of progress.
Our principal domestic interest, on reassembling at Oxford for
Michaelmas Term, was the prospect of exchanging the remote and
incommodious semi-detached villa, in which our Benedictine Hall had
been hitherto housed, for the curious mansion near Folly Bridge, built
on arches above the river, "standing in its own grounds," as
auctioneers say (it could not well stand in any one else's!), and known
to most Oxonians as Grandpont House. Besides the Thames bubbling and
swirling at its foundations, it had a little lake of its own, and was
(except by a very circuitous _detour_) accessible only by punt. Rather
fascinating! we all thought; but when the pundits from Ampleforth Abbey
came to inspect, the floods happened to be out everywhere, and our
prospective Hall looked so like Noah's Ark floating on a waste of
waters, that they did not "see their way"[3] to approve of either the
site or the house.
Oxford was preoccupied at this time with the question of who was to
succeed to the Chancellorship {5} vacant by the death of Lord
Salisbury. I attended a meeting of the Conservative caucus summoned to
discuss the matter at the President's lodgings at St. John's. These
gatherings were generally amusing, as the President (most unbending of
old Tories) used to make occasional remarks of a disconcerting kind.
On this occasion he treated us to some reminiscences of the great
Chancellors of the past, adding, "I look round the ranks of prominent
men in the country, including cabinet ministers and ex-ministers, and I
see few if any men of outstanding or even second-rate ability"--the
point of the joke being that next to him was seated the late Chancellor
of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, whose presence and counsel
had been specially invited. The names of Lords Goschen, Lansdowne,
Rosebery, and Curzon were mentioned, the first-named being evidently
the favourite. "Scholar, statesman, financier, educationalist," I
wrote of him in the _Westminster Gazette_ a day or two later, "a
distinguished son of Oriel, versatile, prudent and popular.... The
Fates seem to point to Lord Goschen as the one who shall sit in the
vacant chair."[4]
Another less famous Oriel man, my old friend Mgr. Tylee, was in Oxford
this autumn, on his annual visitation of his old college, and came to
see me several times. He gravely assured me that he had "preached his
last sermon in India"; but this was {6} a false alarm. The good
monsignore was as great a "farewellist" as Madame Patti or the late Mr.
Sims Reeves, and at least three years later I heard that he was
meditating another descent on Hindostan; though why he went there, or
why he stayed away, I imagine few people either knew or cared.[5]
We were all interested this term in the award of the senior Kennicott
Hebrew scholarship to a Catholic, Frederic Ingle of St. John's, who had
already, previous to his change of creed, gained the Pusey and Ellerton
Prize, and other honours in {7} Scriptural subjects. One could not
help wondering whether it came as a little surprise to the Anglican
examiners to find that they had awarded the scholarship to a young man
studying for the Catholic priesthood at the Collegio Beda in Rome, an
institution specially founded for the ecclesiastical education of
converts to the Roman Church. The "Hertford" this year, by the way,
the Blue Ribbon of Latin scholarship, was also held by a Catholic, a
young Jesuit of Pope's Hall--Cyril Martindale, the most brilliant
scholar of his time at Oxford, who carried off practically every
classical distinction the university had to offer. The "Hertford" was
won next year (1904) by another Catholic, Wilfrid Greene, scholar of
Christ Church.
I celebrated in 1903 not only my fiftieth birthday, but the silver
jubilee of my entrance into the Benedictine Order; and I went to keep
the latter interesting anniversary at Belmont Priory in Herefordshire,
where twenty-five years before (December 8, 1878) I had received the
novice's habit. Two or three of the older members of the community,
who had been my fellow-novices in those far-off days, were still in
residence there; and from them and all I received a warm welcome and
many kind congratulations. These jubilees, golden and silver, are apt
to make one moralize; and some words from an unknown or forgotten
source were in my mind at this time:
Such dates are milestones on the grey, monotonous road of our lives:
they are eddying pools in the stream of time, in which the memory rests
for a moment, like the whirling leaf in the torrent, until it is caught
up anew, and carried on by the resistless current towards the
everlasting ocean.
{8}
Soon after the end of term I made my way northwards, to spend
Christmas, as so many before, with the Lovats at Beaufort, where the
topic of interest was the engagement, just announced, of Norfolk to his
cousin, elder daughter of Lord Herries. We played our traditional game
of croquet in the sunshine of Christmas Day, and spent a pleasant
fortnight, of which, however, the end was saddened for me by the
premature death of my niece's husband, Charles Orr Ewing, M.P. They
had only just finished the beautiful house they had built on the site
of my old home, Dunskey, and were looking forward to happy years there.
I was at Arundel for a few days after New Year, and found the Duke very
busy with improvements, inspecting new gardening operations, and so on;
"and after all," he said, "some one will be coming by-and-by who may
not like it!" From Arundel I dawdled along the south coast to
Canterbury, and paid a delightful visit to my old friends Canon and
Mrs. Moore at their charming residence (incorporating the ancient
monastic guest-house) in the close. I spent hours exploring the
glorious cathedral--the most interesting (_me judice_) if not the most
beautiful in England. The close, too, really is a close, with a
watchman singing out in the small hours, "Past two o'clock--misty
morning--a-all's we-e-ell!" and the enclosure so complete that though
we could hear the Bishop of Dover's dinner-bell on the other side of
the wall, my host and hostess had to drive quite a long way round,
through the mediaeval gate-house, to join the episcopal dinner-party.
Their schoolboy son invited me that night to accompany the watchman (an
old {9} greybeard sailor with a Guy Fawkes lantern, who looked himself
like a relic of the Middle Ages) in his eleven o'clock peregrination
round the cathedral. A weird experience! the vast edifice totally
dark[6] save for the flickering gleam of the single candle, in whose
wavering light pillars and arches and chantries and tombs peered
momentarily out of the gloom like petrified ghosts.
I saw other interesting things at Canterbury, notably St. Martin's old
church (perhaps the most venerable in the kingdom),[7] and left for
London, where, walking through Hyde Park on a sunshiny Sunday morning,
I lingered awhile to watch the perfervid stump-orators wasting their
eloquence on the most listless of audiences. "Come along, Mary Ann,
let's give one of the other blokes a turn," was the prevailing
sentiment; but I did manage to catch one gem from a Free Thought
spouter, whose advocacy of _post mortem_ annihilation was being
violently assailed by one of his hearers. "Do you mean to tell me,"
shouted the heckler, "that when I am dead I fade absolutely away and am
done with for ever?"--to which query came the prompt {10} reply, "I
sincerely hope so, sir!"[8] Lord Cathcart (a great frequenter of the
Park), to whom I repeated the above repartee, amused me by quoting an
unconsciously funny phrase he had heard from a labour orator near the
Marble Arch: "What abaht the working man? The working man is the
backbone of this country--and I tell you _strite_, that backbone 'as
got to come to the front!"[9]
I left Paddington for Oxford in absolutely the blackest fog I had ever
seen: it turned brown at Baling, grey at Maidenhead, and at Didcot the
sun was shining quite cheerfully. I found the floods almost
unprecedentedly high, and the "loved city" abundantly justifying its
playful sobriquet of "Spires and Ponds." A Catholic freshman, housed
in the ground floor of Christ Church Meadow-buildings, described to me
his dismay at the boldness and voracity of the rats which invaded his
rooms from the meadows when the floods were out. The feelings of Lady
Bute when she visited Oxford about this time, and found her treasured
son--who had boarded at a private tutor's at Harrow, and had never
roughed it in his life--literally immured in an underground cellar
beneath Peckwater Quad, may be {11} better imagined than described. It
is fair to add that the youth himself had made no complaint, and
shouted with laughter when I paid him a visit in his extraordinary
subterranean quarters in the richest college in Oxford.
The last words remind me of a visit paid me during this term by Dom
Ferotin and a colleague from Farnborough Abbey. Escorting my guests
through Christ Church, I mentioned the revenue of the House as
approximately L80,000 a year, a sum which sounded colossal when
translated into francs. "Deux millions par an! mais c'est incroyable,"
was their comment, as we mounted the great Jacobean staircase.
"Twopence each, please," said the nondescript individual who threw open
the hall door. It was an anti-climax; but we "did" the pictures
without further remark, and I remember noticing an extraordinary
resemblance (which the guide also observed) to the distinguished French
Benedictine in the striking portrait of Dr. Liddon hanging near the
fireplace. We lunched with my friend Grissell in High Street, meeting
there the Baron de Bertouche, a young man with a Danish father and a
Scottish mother, born in Italy, educated in France, owning property in
Belgium, and living in Wales--too much of a cosmopolitan, it seemed to
me, to be likely to get the commission in the Pope's Noble Guard which
appeared at that time to be his chief ambition.[10]
{12}
I remember two lectures about this time: one to the Newman Society
about Dickens, by old Percy Fitzgerald, who almost wept at hearing
irreverent undergraduates avow that the Master's pathos was "all
piffle," and that Paul Dombey and Little Nell made them sick; the other
a paper on "Armour" (his special hobby) by Lord Dillon. I asked him if
he could corroborate what I had heard as a boy, that men who took down
their ancestral armour from their castle walls to buckle on for the
great Eglinton Tournament, seventy years ago, found that they could not
get into it! I was surprised that this fact (if it be a fact) was new
to so great an authority as Lord Dillon; but we had no time to discuss
the matter. Mr. Justice Walton, the Catholic judge, also came down and
addressed the "Newman," I forget on what subject; but I remember his
being "heckled" on the question as to whether a barrister was justified
in conscience in defending (say) a murderer of whose guilt he was
personally convinced. The judge maintained that he was.
February 15 was Norfolk's wedding-day--a quiet and pious ceremony,
after his own heart, in the private chapel at Everingham. I recollect
the date, because I attended that evening a French play--Moliere's _Les
Femmes Savantes_--at an Oxford convent school. It was quite well done,
entirely by girls; but the unique feature was that the "men" of the
comedy were attired as to coats, waistcoats, wigs and lace _jabots_ in
perfectly correct Louis XIV. style, but below the waist--in petticoats!
the result being that they ensconced themselves as far as possible,
throughout the play, behind {13} tables and chairs, and showed no more
of their legs than the Queen of Spain.
Going down to Arundel for Holy Week and Easter, I read in _The Times_
Hugh Macnaghten's strangely moving lines on Hector Macdonald,[11] whose
tragic death was announced this week. Easter was late this year, the
weather balmy, and the spring advanced; and the park and the whole
countryside starred with daffodils and anemones, primroses and
hyacinths. Between the many church services we enjoyed some delightful
rambles; and the Duke's marriage had made no difference to his love of
croquet and of the inevitable game of "ten questions" after dinner.
The great church looked beautiful on Easter morning, with its wealth of
spring flowers; and the florid music was no doubt finely rendered,
though I do not like Gounod in church at Easter or at any other time.
I refrained, however, when my friend the organist asked me what I
thought of his choir, from replying, as Cardinal Capranica did to a
similar question from Pope Nicholas V.--"that it seemed to him like a
sack of young swine, for he heard a great noise, but could distinguish
nothing articulate!"[12]
{14}
All the clergy of St. Philip's church dined at the castle on Easter
Sunday evening; and the young Duchess, wearing her necklace of big
diamonds (Sheffield's wedding present), was a most kind and pleasant
hostess. Two days later my friend Father MacCall and I left England
_en route_ for Rome, crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe in three-quarters
of a gale. _Infandum jubes_.... The boat was miserable, so was the
passage; but we survived it, hurried on through France and Italy (our
_direttissimo_ halting at all kinds of unnecessary places), and reached
Rome at the hour of Ave Maria, almost exactly twenty-six years since my
previous visit. What memories, as from our modest _pension_ in the Via
Sistina we looked once again on the familiar and matchless prospect!
My companion hurried off at once to the bedside of a fever-stricken
friend; and my first pilgrimage was of course to St. Peter's. I felt,
as I swung aside the heavy "baby-crusher,"[13] {15} and entered, almost
holding my breath, that strange sense of exhilaration which Eugenie de
Ferronays described so perfectly.[14] Preparations were on foot for
the coming _festa_,[15] and the "Sanpietrini" flying, as of old, a
hundred feet from the floor, hanging crimson brocades--a fearsome
spectacle. On Sunday we Benedictines kept the Gregorian festival at
our own great basilica of St. Paul's; but the chief celebration was
next day at St. Peter's, where Pope Pius X. himself pontificated in the
presence of 40,000 people, and a choir of a thousand monks (of which I
had the privilege of being one) rendered the Gregorian music with
thrilling effect. All was as in the great days of old--the Papal March
blown on silver trumpets; the long procession up the great nave of
abbots, bishops, and cardinals, conspicuous among them Cardinals
Rampolla, with his fine features and grave penetrating look, and Merry
del Val (the youthful Secretary of State), tall, dark, and strikingly
handsome; the Pontifical Court, chamberlains in their quaint mediaeval
dress; and, finally, high on his _sedia gestatoria_, with the white
peacock-feather fans waving on right and left, the venerable figure of
the Pope, mitred, and wearing his long embroidered _manto_: turning
kind eyes from side to side on the vast concourse, and {16} blessing
them with uplifted hand as he passed. His Holiness celebrated the Mass
with wonderful devotion, as quiet and collected as if he had been alone
in his oratory. High above our heads, at the Elevation, the silver
trumpets sounded the well-known melody, and the Swiss Guards round the
altar brought down their halberts with a crash on the pavement.[16]
After the great function I lunched with the Giustiniani Bandinis in the
Foro Trajano, where three generations of the princely family were
living together, in Roman patriarchal fashion. But (_quantum
mutatus!_) the old Prince had sold his historic palace in the
Corso;[17] and his heir, Mondragone, who talked to me of sending his
son to Christ Church as the Master of Kynnaird, seemed to shy at the
expense.[18] They had all been at St. Peter's, in the tribune of the
"Patriciato," that morning, and were unanimous (so like Romans!) in
their {17} verdict that the glorious Gregorian music would have been
much more appropriate to a funeral!
I was happy to enjoy a nearer view of the Holy Father before leaving
Rome, in a private audience which he gave to the English Catholic
Union. A slightly stooping figure, bushy grey hair, a rather care-worn
kind face, a large penetrating eye--this was my first impression. His
manner was wonderfully simple and courteous; and by his wish
("s'accommodarsi") we sat down in a little group around him. This
absence of formality was, I thought, no excuse for the bad manners of a
lady of rank, who pulled out a fountain pen, and asked his Holiness to
sign the photograph of her extensive family.[19] The Pope looked at
the little implement and shook his head. "Non capisco queste cose de
nuova moda," he said; and we followed him into another room--I think
his private library--where he seated himself before a great golden
inkstand, and with a long quill pen wrote beneath the family group a
verse from the hundred and twenty-seventh Psalm.[20] I had an
opportunity of asking, not for an autograph, but for a blessing on our
Oxford Benedictines, and on my mother-house at Fort Augustus.
Next day my friend and I left Rome for Monte Cassino--my first visit to
the cradle of our venerable Order. I was deeply impressed, and felt,
perhaps, on the summit of the holy mount, nearer heaven, both
materially and spiritually, than I had ever {18} done before. To
celebrate Mass above the shrine of Saint Benedict, at an altar designed
by Raphael, was my Sunday privilege. The visitors at the abbey and a
devout crowd of _contadini_ (many of them from the foot of the
mountain) were my congregation; and the monks sang the plain-chant mass
grouped round a huge illuminated _Graduale_ on an enormous lectern.
Three memorable days here, and I had to hasten northward, halting very
briefly to renew old enchanting memories of Florence and Milan, and
reaching Oxford just in time for the opening of the summer term.
[1] Lord Bute once told me that it was from him that the Earl Marshal
first learned the meaning and origin of the honourable augmentation
(the demi-lion of Scotland) which he bore on his coat-armorial.
[2] One of the first acts of Pope Pius X. had been to translate Bishop
Bourne of Southwark to the metropolitan see of Westminster, in
succession to Cardinal Vaughan, who had died on June 19. Archbishop
Bourne became a Cardinal in 1911.
[3] My father used to hate this "new-fangled phrase," as he called it.
"'See my way'! What does the man mean by 'see my way'? No, I do
_not_ 'see my way,'" he used to protest when a request for a
subscription or donation was prefaced by this unlucky formula, and the
appeal was instantly consigned to the waste-paper basket.
[4] Lord Goschen was elected on November 2 without a contest, the only
other candidate "in the running" (Lord Rosebery) having declined to
stand unless unopposed. Our new Chancellor lived to hold the office
for little more than three years, dying in February, 1907.
[5] Tylee's sole connection with India was that he had once been
domestic chaplain to Lord Ripon, who, however (much to his chagrin),
left him behind in England when he went out as Viceroy. When the
monsignore preached at St. Andrews, as he occasionally did when
visiting George Angus there, the latter used to advertise him in the
local newspaper as "ex-chaplain to the late Viceroy of India," which
pleased him not a little. He was fond of preaching, and carried about
with him in a tin box (proof against white ants) a pile of sermons,
mostly translated by himself from the great French orators of the
eighteenth century, and laboriously committed to memory. I remember
his once firing off at the astonished congregation of a small seaside
chapel, _a propos des bottes_, Bossuet's funeral oration on Queen
Henrietta Maria.
Through a friend at the Vatican, Tylee got a brief or rescript from the
Pope, who was told that he went to preach in India, and commended him
in the document, with some reference to the missionary labours of St.
Francis Xavier in that country. The monsignore was immensely proud of
this. "Haven't you seen my Papal Bull?" he would cry when India
cropped up in conversation, as it generally did in his presence. The
fact was that when in India the good man used to stay with a
Commissioner or General commanding, and deliver one of his famous
sermons in the station or garrison church, to a handful of British
Catholics or Irish soldiers. He never learned a word of any native
language, and did no more missionary work in India than if he had
stayed at home in his Kensington villa.
[6] The Dean, my host told me, whilst prowling about the crypt in
semi-darkness once noticed one of the chapels lit up by a rosy gleam.
The Chapter was promptly summoned, and the canon-sacrist interrogated
as to how and why a votive red lamp had been suspended before an altar
without decanal authority. The crypt verger was called in to explain
the phenomenon. "Bless your heart, Mr. Dean," said the good man, "that
ain't no red lamp you saw--only an old oil stove which I fished up and
put in that chapel to try and dry up the damp a bit."
[7] I suppose that there had been a Christian church on the site for
thirteen centuries. On the day of my visit it was locked and
barred--discouraging to pilgrims.
[8] The converse of this story is that of the orthodox but sadly prosy
preacher who was demonstrating at great length the certainty of his own
immortality. "Yes, my brethren, the mighty mountains shall one day be
cast into the sea, but I shall live on. Nay, the seas themselves, the
vast oceans which cover the greater part of the earth, shall dry up;
but not I--not I!" And the congregation really thought that he never
would!
[9] One more instance of Park repartee I must chronicle: the Radical
politician shouting, "I want land reform--I want housing reform--I want
education reform--I want----" and the disconcerting interruption,
"Chloroform!"
[10] His mother, though a Catholic like himself, was a devotee of
"Father Ignatius," and lived at Llanthony. She travelled about
everywhere with the visionary "Monk of the Church of England," acting
as pew-opener, money-taker, and general mistress of the ceremonies at
his lectures, and had published an extraordinary biography of him.
[11] Have they ever been reprinted? I know not. Here they are:--
"Leave him alone:
The death forgotten, and the truth unknown.
Enough to know
Whate'er he feared, he never feared a foe.
Believe the best,
O English hearts! and leave him to his rest."
[12] These words were penned in 1449 by one whom a contemporary layman
described on his death as "the wisest, the most perfect, the most
learned, and the holiest prelate whom the Church has in our day
possessed." His beautiful tomb is in the Minerva church in Rome.
Exactly a century later (1549) Cirillo Franchi wrote on the same
subject, and in the same vein, to Ugolino Gualteruzzi: "It is their
greatest happiness to contrive that while one is saying _Sanctus_, the
other should say _Sabaoth_, and a third _Gloria tua_, with certain
howls, bellowings, and guttural sounds, so that they more resemble cats
in January than flowers in May!"
Who recalls now Ruskin's famous invective against modern Italian music,
in which, after lauding a part-song, "done beautifully and joyfully,"
which he heard in a smithy in Perugia, he goes on: "Of bestial howling,
and entirely frantic vomiting up of hopelessly damned souls through
their still carnal throats, I have heard more than, please God, I will
endeavour to hear ever again, in one of his summers." It is fair to
say that the reference here is probably not to church music.
[13] The name which we English used playfully to give to the great
heavy leather curtains which hang at the entrance of the Roman churches.
[14] Speaking of the impression of _triumph_ which one receives on
entering St. Peter's, she continues: "Tandis que dans les eglises
gothiques, l'impression est de s'agenouiller, de joindre les mains avec
un sentiment d'humble priere et de profond regret, dans St. Pierre, au
contraire, le mouvement involuntaire serait d'ouvrir les bras en signe
de joie, de relever la tete avec bonheur et epanouissement."--_Recit
d'une Soeur_, ii. 298.
[15] The thirteenth centenary of St. Gregory the Great (d. March 12,
1904).
[16] It was at this supreme moment that an Englishman of the baser sort
once rose to his feet, and looking round exclaimed, "Is there no one in
this vast assemblage who will lift up his voice with me, and protest
against this idolatry?" "If you don't get down in double quick time,"
retorted an American who was on his knees close by, "there's one man in
this vast assemblage who will lift up his foot and kick you out of the
church!"
[17] A day or two after writing these lines (1921) I heard that this
famous palazzo had been acquired as an official residence by the
Brazilian Ambassador to the Quirinal.
[18] The Scottish Earldom of Newburgh (1660), of which Kynnaird was the
second title, had been adjudged to Prince Bandini's mother by the House
of Lords in 1858. The Duca Mandragone consulted me as to the expense
of three years at Oxford for his son. He thought the sum I named very
reasonable; but I really believe he supposed me to be quoting the
figure in _lire_, not in pounds sterling, which he found quite
impossible.
[19] Would Lady X---- (who was familiar with Courts) have acted thus in
an audience granted her by King Edward VII.? I rather think not.
[20] Verse 4. "Filii tui sicut noveliae olivarum, in circuitu mensae
tuae."
{19}
CHAPTER II
1904
Abbot Gasquet, who had many friends in Oxford, was much in residence
there during the summer of 1904, as he was giving the weekly
conferences to our undergraduates. His host, Mgr. Kennard, usually
asked me to dinner on Sundays, "to keep the Abbot going," which
released me from the chilly collation (cold mutton and cold rhubarb
pie), the orthodox Sabbath evening fare in so many households.[1] I
recall the lovely Sundays of this summer term, and the crowds of
peripatetic dons and clerics in the parks and on the river bank: many
of them, I fancy, the serious-minded persons who would have thought it
their duty, a year previously, to attend the afternoon university
sermon, lately abolished. The afternoon discourse had come to be
allotted to the second-rate preachers; and I had heard of a clergyman
who, when charged with walking in the country instead of attending at
St. Mary's, defended himself by saying that he preferred "sermons from
stones" to sermons from "sticks!"[2]
{20}
The biggest clerical gathering I ever saw in Oxford was on a bright May
afternoon in 1904, when hundreds of parsons were whipped up from the
country to oppose the abolition of the statute restricting the
honour-theology examinerships to clergymen. Scores of black-coats were
hanging about the Clarendon Buildings, waiting to go in and vote; and
they "boo'd" and cat-called in the theatre, refusing to let their
opponents be heard. They carried their point by an enormous
majority.[3]
Kennard took me to London, on another day in May, to see the
Academy--some astonishing Sargents, Mrs. Wertheimer all in black, with
diamonds which made you wink, and the Duchess of Sutherland in arsenic
green, painted against a background of dewy magnolia-leaves,
extraordinarily vivid and brilliant. I was at Blenheim a few days
later, and admired there (besides the wonderful tapestries and a
roomful of Reynolds's) two striking portraits--one by Helleu, the other
by Carolus-Duran--of the young American Duchess of Marlborough.
An enjoyable event in June was the quadrennial open-air Greek play at
Bradfield College--_Alcestis_ on this occasion, not so thrilling as
_Agamemnon_ four years ago, but very well done, and the death of the
heroine really very touching. A showery {21} garden party at beautiful
Osterley followed close on this: the Crown Prince of Sweden, who was
the guest of honour, had forgotten to announce the hour of his arrival,
was not met at the station, and walked up in the rain. I sat for a
time with Bishop Patterson and the old Duke of Rutland (looking very
tottery), and we spoke of odd texts for sermons. The Bishop mentioned
a "total abstinence" preacher who could find nothing more suitable than
"The young men who carried the _bier_ stood still"! The Duke's
contribution was the verse "Let him that is on the housetop not come
down," the sermon being against "chignons," and the actual text the
last half of the verse--"Top-knot come down"! They were both pleased
with my reminiscence of a sermon preached against Galileo, in 1615,
from the text, "Viri Galilaei, quid statis aspicientes in coelum?"
As soon as I could after term I went north to Scotland, where I was
engaged to superintend the Oxford Local examinations at the Benedictine
convent school at Dumfries. It was a new experience for me to preside
over school-girls! I found them much less fidgety than boys, but it
struck me that the masses of hair tumbling into their eyes and over
their desks must be a nuisance: however, I suppose they are used to it.
The convent, founded by old Lady Herries, was delightfully placed atop
of a high hill, overlooking the river Nith, the picturesque old Border
town, and a wide expanse of my native Galloway. My work over, I went
on to visit the Edmonstoune-Cranstouns at their charming home close to
the tumbling Clyde. I found them entertaining a party of Canadian
bowlers and their ladies; {22} and in the course of the day we were all
decorated with the Order of the Maple-leaf! I went south after this to
spend a few days with my good old friend Bishop Wilkinson, at Ushaw
College, near Durham, of which he was president. An old Harrovian, and
one of the few survivors of Newman's companions at Littlemore, he was
himself a Durham man (his father had owned a large estate in the
county), and had been a keen farmer, as well as an excellent parish
priest, before his elevation to the bishopric of Hexham. He showed me
all over the finely equipped college (which he had done much to
improve), and pointing out a Dutch landscape, with cattle grazing,
hanging in a corridor, remarked, "That is by a famous 'old master.' I
don't know much about pictures, but I do know something about cows; and
God never made a cow like that one!"[4] The good old man held an
ordination during my visit, and was quite delighted (being himself a
thorough John Bull) that "John Bull" happened to be the name of one of
his candidates for the priesthood. "Come again soon," he said, when I
kissed his ring as I took my leave; "they give us wine at table when
there is a guest, and I do like a glass of sherry with my lunch." The
old bishop lived for nearly four years longer, but I never saw him
again.
I was delighted with a visit I paid a little later to Hawkesyard
Priory, the newly acquired property {23} of the Dominicans in
Staffordshire: a handsome modern house (now their school) in a
finely-timbered park, and close by the new monastery, its spacious
chapel, with carved oak stalls, a great sculptured reredos recalling
All Souls or New College, and an organ which had been in our chapel at
Eton in my school days. I made acquaintance here with the young
Blackfriar who was to matriculate in the autumn at our Benedictine
Hall--the first swallow, it was hoped, of the Dominican summer, the
revival of the venerable Order of Preachers _in gremio
universitatis_.[5]
A kind and musical friend[6] insisted on carrying me off this August to
Munich, to attend the Mozart-Wagner festival there. We stayed at the
famous old "Four Seasons," and I enjoyed renewing acquaintance, after
more than thirty years, with a city which seemed to me very like what
it was in 1871. The Mozart operas (at the small Residenz-theater) were
rather disappointing. The title-role in _Don Giovanni_ was perfectly
done by Feinhals; but Anna and Elvira squalled, not even in tune. The
enchanting music of Zauberfloete hardly compensated for the tedious
story; and no one except the {24} Sarastro (one Hesch, a Viennese) was
first-class. The Wagner plays, in the noble new Prinz Regenten
theatre, pleased me much more: Knote and Van Rooy were quite excellent,
and Feinhals even better as the Flying Dutchman than as Don Giovanni.
I heard more Mozart on the Assumption in our Benedictine basilica of
St. Boniface--the Twelfth Mass, done by a mixed choir in the gallery!
I preferred the Sunday high mass at the beautiful old Frauenkirche,
with its exquisite stained glass, and its towers crowned with the
curious renaissance cupolas which the Muencheners first called "Italian
caps," and later "masskruege," or beer-mugs. I admired the attention
and devotion of the great congregation at the cathedral: a few stood,
nearly all knelt, throughout the long service, but no one seemed to
think of sitting.
We made one day the pleasant steamer trip round Lake Starnberg, with
its pretty wooded shores, and the dim mysterious snow-clad Alps
(Wetterstein and other peaks) looming in the background. A middle-aged
Graf on board (I think an ex-diplomatist) talked interestingly on many
subjects, Bismarck among others. He said that the only serious attempt
at reconciliation between him and the Kaiser, ten years before, had
been frustrated not by the latter but by Bismarck himself, who was
constantly ridiculing the young Emperor both in public and in private.
It was odd, he added, how the number _three_ had pervaded Bismarck's
life and personality. His motto was "In Trinitate robur": he had
served three emperors, fought in three wars, signed three treaties of
peace, established the Triple Alliance, had three children and three
estates; and {25} his arms were a trefoil and three oak-leaves.
Talking of Austria, our friend quoted a dictum of Talleyrand (very
interesting in 1921)--"Austria is the House of Lords of Europe: as long
as it is not dissolved it will restrain the Commons." Dining together
in our hotel at Munich, he told us that the "Four Seasons" possessed,
or had possessed, the finest wine in Europe, having bought up Prince
Metternich's famous cellar (including his priceless Johannisberger and
Steinberger Cabinet hocks) at his death. Of Metternich he said it was
a fact that in 1825 Cardinal Albani was instructed by the Pope to sound
the great statesman as to whether he desired a Cardinal's hat--"in
which case," added his Holiness, "I will propose him in the next Secret
Consistory."
We were much amused at reading in a local newspaper the result of a
"longest word" competition. The prize-winners were
"Transvaaltruppentropentransport
trampelthiertreibentrauungsthraenentragoedie," and
"Mekkamuselmannenmeuchelmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher"![7] I
had hitherto considered the longest existing word to be the Cherokee
"Winitawigeginaliskawlungtanawneletisesti"; it was given me by a French
missionary to that North American tribe, whom I once met at the Comte
de Franqueville's house in Paris, {26} and who said it meant,
"They-will-now-have-finished-their-compliments-to-you-and-to-me"! I
remember the same good priest telling me that when the first French
missionary bishop went to New Zealand, he found the natives incapable
of pronouncing the word "eveque" or "bishop," their language consisting
of only thirteen letters, mostly vowels and liquids. He therefore
coined the word _picopo_, from "episcopus," which the natives applied
to all Catholics. English Catholics they called _picopo poroyaxono_,
from Port Jackson (Sydney), which most of them had visited in trading
ships; while French Catholics were known as _picopo wee-wee_, from the
constantly-heard words, "Oui, oui."
Our pleasant sojourn at Munich over, we made a bee-line home (as we had
done from England to Bavaria), without stopping anywhere _en route_, as
I was bound to be present at certain religious celebrations at
Woodchester Priory, in the Vale of Stroud. I was always much attracted
by the Gloucestershire home of the Dominican Order: it was built of the
warm cream-coloured stone of the district, and with its gables, low
spire, and high-pitched roofs looked as if it really belonged to the
pretty village, and was not, like most modern monasteries, a mere
accretion of incongruous buildings round an uninteresting
dwelling-house.[8] From Woodchester I went over one day to Weston
Birt, a vast ornate neo-Jacobean mansion set in the loveliest gardens,
and a not unworthy country pendant to the owner's {27} palace in Park
Lane, to which (as I told my hostess) I once adjudged the second place
among the great houses of London.[9]
I spent the rest of the Long Vacation at Fort Augustus, whither the
summer-like autumn had attracted many visitors, and where a golf-course
had been lately opened. Golf, too, and nothing but golf, was in the
air during my annual visit to St. Andrews, which coincided with the
Medal Week there. A lady told me that, looking for a book to give her
golfing daughter on her birthday, she was tempted by a pretty volume
called _Evangeline, Tale of a Caddie_, and was disappointed to find
that Longfellow meant something quite different by "Acadie!" "Medal
Day" was perfect, and the crowd enormous. I was passing the links as
two famous competitors (Laidlaw and Mure Fergusson) came in--a cordon
round the putting-green, and masses of spectators watching with bated
breath. No cheers or enthusiasm as at cricket or football--a curious
(and _I_ thought depressing) spectacle. In the club I came on old Lord
---- (of Session), anathematizing his luck and his partner, as his
manner was. Some one told me that it was only at golf that he really
let himself go. Once in Court he addressed a small boy, whose head
hardly appeared above the witness-box, with dignified solicitude: "Tell
me, my boy, do you understand the nature of an {28} oath?" "Aye, my
lord," came the youngster's prompt response, "ain't I your caddie?"
I think that it was at the climax of the medal-week festivities that
the news came of the sudden death (in his sleep) of Sir William
Harcourt at Nuneham, to which he had only lately succeeded. He had
survived just ten years the crowning disappointment of his life, his
passing-over for the premiership on the final resignation of Gladstone.
He had long outlived (no small achievement) the intense unpopularity of
his early years; and it seemed almost legendary to recall how three
members of parliament had once resolved to invite to dinner the
individual they disliked most in the world. Covers were laid (as the
reporters say) for six; but only one guest turned up--Sir William
Vernon Harcourt, who had been invited by all three!
I reached Oxford in October to find our Benedictine Hall migrated from
the suburbs to a much more commodious site in dull but rather dignified
Beaumont Street.[10] The proximity of a hideous "Gothic" hotel, and of
the ponderous pseudo-Italian Ashmolean Galleries, did not appeal to us;
but the site was conveniently central, and was moreover holy ground,
for we were within the actual enclosure of the old Carmelite Priory,
and close to Benedictine {29} Worcester, beyond which Cistercian Rowley
(on the actual site of whose high altar now stands the bookstall of the
L.N.W.R. station!) and Augustinian Oseney had stretched out into the
country. One of my first guests in Beaumont Street was Alfred Plowden,
the witty and genial Metropolitan magistrate, then just sixty, but as
good-looking as ever, and full of amusing yarns about his Westminster
and Brasenose days. I think he was the best _raconteur_ I ever met,
and one of the most eloquent of speakers when once "off" on a subject
in which he was really interested. On this occasion he got started on
Jamaica, where he had been private secretary to the Governor after
leaving Oxford; and his description of his experiences in that
fascinating island was delightful to listen to.
Lord Ralph Kerr's son Philip, who got his First Class in history in
June, came up this term to try for an All Souls fellowship. There is a
sharp competition nowadays for these university plums; and the
qualification is no longer, as the old jibe ran, "bene natus, bene
vestitus, medocriter doctus." I prefer the older and sounder
standard--"bene legere, bene construere, bene cantare." There seemed,
by the way, a certain whimsicality in some cases in the qualifications
for the Rhodes Scholarships here. I had a call about this time from
the Archbishop of St. John's, Newfoundland, who wished to interest me
in a scholar from that colony (called Sidney Herbert!) who was coming
up after Christmas. His Grace said that the youth had been required to
pass three "tests"--a religious one from his parish priest, an
intellectual one, from the authorities of his college, and a social
one, from {30} his classmates; and I felt some curiosity as to the
nature of the last-named.[11] Amusing stories were current at this
time about the Rhodes Scholars. One young don told me that an American
scholar had replied, when asked what was his religion, "Well, sir, I
can best describe myself as a _quasi_-Christian scientist."--"Do you
think," the don asked me, "he meant the word '_quasi_' to apply to
'Christian' or to 'scientist'?" Another young American drifted into
Keble, but never attended chapel--a circumstance unheard-of in that
exclusively Anglican preserve. Questioned as to whether he was not a
member of the "Protestant Episcopal Church" (if not, what on earth was
he doing at Keble?), he rejoined, "Certainly not; he was a 'Latter-day
Saint'!" He was deported without delay to a rather insignificant
college, where it was unkindly said that the Head was so delighted to
get a saint of any kind that he welcomed him with open arms.[12]
A Rhodes Scholar, who had been also a fellow of his university in
U.S.A., showed himself so lamentably below the expected standard, that
his Oxford tutor expressed his surprise at a scholar {31} and a fellow
knowing so little. "I think you somewhat misapprehend the position,"
was the reply. "In the University of X---- fellowships are awarded for
purely political reasons." To another college tutor, who voiced his
disappointment that after a complete course at his own university a
Rhodes Scholar should be so deplorably deficient in Greek and Latin,
came the ready explanation: "In the university where _I_ was raised,
sir, we only _skim_ the classics!" A Balliol Rhodes Scholar, who had
failed to present the essential weekly essay, replied to his tutor's
expostulation, in the inimitable drawl of the Middle West: "Well, sir,
I have not found myself able to com-pose an essay on the theme
indicated by the college authorities; but I have brought you instead a
few notes of my own on the po-sition of South Dakota in American
politics."
The mention of classics reminds me that the question of the retention
or abolition of compulsory Greek was a burning one at this time.
Congregation had voted for its abolition in the summer of 1904; but on
November 29 we reversed that decision by a majority of 36. I met Dean
Liddell's widow at dinner that week, and said that I supposed that she,
like myself, was old-fashioned enough to want Greek retained. "_Of
course_ I am," said the old lady: "Think of the Lexicon!" which I had
in truth forgotten for the moment, as well as the comfortable addition
which it no doubt made to her jointure. Rushforth of St. Mary Hall, to
whom I repeated this little dialogue after dinner, told me that he
possessed a letter from Scott to Liddell, calling his attention to
Aristoph. Lys., v. 1263, and {32} adding, "Do you think that [Greek:
chunage parsene] in this line means 'a hunting parson'?" Talking of
Greek, I interested my friends by citing two lines from the _Ajax_,
which (I had never seen this noticed) required only a change from
plural to singular to be a perfect invocation to the Blessed Virgin:
[Greek: Kalo darogon ten te parthena,
aei th horonta panta ten brotois pathe.][13]
A distinguished visitor to Oxford this autumn was Lord Rosebery, who
came up to open--no, that is not the word: to unveil--but I do not
think it was ever veiled: let us say to inaugurate, Frampton's fine
bust of Lord Salisbury in the Union debating-hall. To pronounce the
panegyric of a political opponent, with whose principles, practice, and
ideals he had always been profoundly at variance, was just the task for
Lord Rosebery to perform with perfect tact, eloquence and taste. His
speech was a complete success, and so was his graceful and polished
tribute to the young president of the Union, W. G. Gladstone, whose
likeness, with his high collar and sleekly-brushed black hair, to the
youthful portrait of his illustrious grandfather, immediately behind
him, was quite noticeable.
A whimsical incident in connection with this visit of the ex-premier
may be, at this distance of time, recalled without offence. I had
repeated to his Oxford hostess a story told me by the Principal of a
Scottish university, of how Lord Rosebery, engaged to speak at a great
Liberal meeting in a {33} northern city, found himself previously
dining with a fanatically teetotal Provost, who provided for his guests
no other liquid refreshment than orangeade in large glass jugs. As
this depressing beverage circulated, the Liberal leader's spirits fell
almost to zero; and it was by the advice of my friend the principal
that, between the dinner and the meeting, he drove _ventre a terre_ to
an hotel, and quaffed a pint of dry champagne before mounting the
platform and making a speech of fiery eloquence, which the good provost
attributed entirely to the orangeade! The lady, unknown to me, passed
on this delectable story to one of the Union Committee, who took it
very seriously: the result being that when Lord Rosebery reached the
committee-room, just before the inauguration ceremony, a grave young
man whispered to him confidentially: "There are tea and coffee here;
but I have got your pint of cha[oe]pagne behind that screen: _will you
come and have it now?_" "Well, do you know?" said the great man with
his usual tact,[14] "I think for once in a way I will have a cup of
coffee!" I do not suppose he ever knew exactly why this untimely pint
of champagne was proffered to him by his undergraduate hosts; and he
probably thought no more about the matter.
Lunching with my friend Bishop Mitchinson, the {34} little Master of
Pembroke, I was shown his new portrait in the hall--quite a good
painting, but not a bit like him, though not in that respect singular
among our Oxford portraits. The supposed picture of Devorguilla,
foundress of Balliol, is, I have been assured, the likeness of an
Oxford baker's daughter, who was tried for bigamy in the eighteenth
century. An even more barefaced imposture is the "portrait" of
Egglesfield (chaplain to Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, and
founder of Queen's), which hangs, or hung, in the hall of that college.
It is really, and manifestly, the likeness of a seventeenth-century
French prelate--probably Bossuet--in the episcopal dress of the time of
Louis XIV! Most of our Magdalen portraits are, I think, authentic; but
then they do not profess to represent personages of the early Middle
Ages! The best and most interesting portraits at Oxford belong to the
nineteenth century. I always enjoyed showing my friends those of Tait
and Manning, side by side in Balliol Hall, and recalling how their
college tutor once remarked, when they had left his room after a
lecture: "Those two undergraduates are worthy and talented young men: I
hope I shall live to see them both archbishops!" His prophetic wish
was duly fulfilled, though he had probably never dreamt of Canterbury
and Westminster!
I remember pleasant visits this autumn to the Abingdons at Wytham
Abbey, their fine old place, set in loveliest woods, within an easy
drive of Oxford. "Why Abbey?" I asked my host, who did not seem to
know that the place had never been a monastery, though part of the
house was of the fifteenth century. Lord Abingdon himself was a kind
{35} of patriarch,[15] with a daughter married four and twenty years,
and a small son not yet four. He was trying to dispose of some of his
land for building, but without great success. The Berkshire side of
the Thames (to my mind far the most beautiful and attractive) was not
the popular quarter for extensions from Oxford, which was spreading far
out towards the north in the uninteresting directions of Banbury and
Woodstock.
Term over, I went north to spend Christmas with the Butes at
Mountstuart, where I found my young host, as was only natural, much
interested in a recent decision of the Scottish Courts, which had
diverted into his pocket L40,000 which his father had bequeathed to two
of the Scottish Catholic dioceses.[16] My Christmas here (the first
for many years) was saddened by old memories; for I missed at every
turn the pervading presence of my lost friend, to whose taste and
genius the varied beauty of his island home was so largely due.
However, our large party of young people gave the right note {36} of
hilarity to the time; and if there was little sunshine without (I noted
that we had never a gleam from Christmas to New Year), there was plenty
of warmth and brightness and merriment within. The graceful crypt (all
that was yet available) of the lovely chapel was fragrant and bright
with tuberoses, chrysanthemums and white hyacinths; and the religious
services of the season were carried out with the care and reverence
which had been the rule, under Lord Bute's supervision, for more than
thirty years. The day after New Year, young Bute left home for London
and Central Africa (the attraction of the black man never seemed to
pall on him), and I made my way to our Highland Abbey to spend the
remainder of the Christmas vacation.
[1] "Do you very much mind dining in the middle of the day?" a would-be
hostess at St. Andrews once asked George Angus. "Oh, not a bit," was
his reply, "as long as I get another dinner in the evening!"
[2] It was, I think, a Scottish critic who suggested an emendation of
the line, "Sermons from stones, books in the running brooks."
Obviously, he said, the transposition was a clerical error, the true
reading being, "Sermons from books, stones in the running brooks!"
[3] Another attempt, nine years later, to abolish the same statute was
decisively defeated; but in 1920 the restriction of degrees in divinity
to Anglican clergymen was removed by a unanimous vote, though the
examinerships are still confined to clergymen.
[4] "Well, now, that is not my idea of an owl," said a casual visitor
to a bird-stuffer's shop, looking at one sitting on a perch in a rather
dark corner. "Isn't it?" replied the bird-stuffer dryly, peering up
over his spectacles. "Well, it's God's, anyhow." The owl was a live
one!
[5] The "young Blackfriar" obtained (in History) the first First Class
gained in our Hall, rose to be Provincial of his Order in England, and
had the happiness of seeing, on August 15, 1921, the foundation stone
of a Dominican church and priory laid at Oxford.
[6] Music was his hobby: by profession he was a chemist, and the City
Analyst of Oxford. I introduced him as such to dear Mgr. Kennard, who
promptly asked us both to dinner, and during the meal laboriously
discussed the mediaeval history of Oxford, which he had carefully
"mugged up" beforehand. He had understood me to say that my friend's
position was that of City _Annalist_!
[7] The English of these uncouth concatenations, which are at least
evidence of the facility with which any number of German words can be
strung together into one, appears to be (as far as I can unravel them):
1. "The tearful tragedy of the marriage of a dromedary-driver on the
transport of Transvaal troops to the tropics." 2. "The maker of a
marble monument for the Moorish mother of a wholesale assassin among
the Mussulmans at Mecca." Pro-dee-gious!
[8] Such were nearly all our Benedictine priories in England--a
circumstance which added to their historic interest, if not to their
architectural homogeneity.
[9] I was once invited to write an article on the "six finest houses in
London." The word "finest," of course, wants defining. However, my
selection, in order of merit, was:--Holland House (perhaps rather a
country house in the metropolitan area than a London house),
Dorchester, Stafford, Bridgewater, and Montagu Houses, and Gwydyr
House, Whitehall. How many Londoners know the last-named?
[10] Built about a century previously, to provide proper access to
Worcester College, then and long afterwards dubbed (from its remoteness
and inaccessibility) "Botany Bay." The only approach to it had been by
a narrow lane, across which linen from the wash used to hang, and once
impeded the dignified progress of a Vice-Chancellor. "If there is a
college there," cried the potentate in a passion, "there must be a road
to it." And the result was Beaumont Street!
[11] Oxonians know the tradition that an All Souls candidate is invited
to dinner at high table, and given cherry pie; and that careful note is
taken as to the manner in which he deals with the stones!
[12] A subsequent legend related that the undergraduates of his new
college were greatly interested in discovering (from reference to an
encyclopaedia) that a Latter-day Saint was equivalent to a Mormon.
"Where were the freshman's wives?" was the natural inquiry. Answer
came there none; but the excitement grew intense when it was rumoured
that he had applied to a fellow of Magdalen for six ladies' tickets for
the chapel service.
[13] "And I call to my assistance her who is ever a Virgin
And who ever looks on all the sufferings among men."
--SOPH. AJAX. v. 835.
[14] "My lord! my lord!" a Midlothian farmer (who had just been served
with an iced souffle) whispered to his host at a tenants' dinner at
Dalmeny: "I'm afraid there's something wrang wi' the pudden: it's stane
cauld." Lord Rosebery instantly called a footman, and spoke to him in
an undertone. "No, do you know?" he said, turning to his guest with a
smile, "it is quite right. I find that this kind of pudding is _meant_
to be cold!"
[15] Less so, however, than the then Earl of Leicester (the second),
between whose eldest daughter (already a grandmother) and youngest
child there was an interval of some fifty years. Lord Ronald Gower
once told Queen Victoria (who liked such titbits of family gossip) the
astonishing, if not unique, fact that Lord Leicester married exactly a
century after his father. The Queen flatly refused to believe it; and
as the Court was at the moment at Aix-les-Bains, Lord Ronald was for
the time unable to adduce documentary evidence that he was not "pulling
her Majesty's leg." The respective dates were, as a matter of fact,
1775 and 1875.
[16] Lord Bute could never do anything quite like other people; and his
legacies to Galloway and Argyll had been hampered by conditions to
which no Catholic bishop, even if he accepted them for himself, could
possibly bind his successor.
{37}
CHAPTER III
1905
There had been an official visitation, by Abbot Gasquet, of our abbey
at Fort Augustus in January, 1905. I had been unable to attend it, but
the news reached me at Oxford that one of its results had been the
resignation of his office by the abbot. This was not so important as
it sounded; for the Holy See did not "see its way" (horrid phrase!) to
accept the proffered resignation, and the abbot remained in office.
I attended this month a Catholic "Demonstration," as it was called (a
word I always hated), in honour of the Bishop of Birmingham--or the
"Catholic Bishop of Oxford," as an enthusiastic convert, who had set up
a bookshop in the city, with a large portrait of Bishop Ilsley in the
window, chose to designate him. The function was in the town hall, and
Father Bernard Vaughan made one of his most florid orations, which got
terribly on the nerves of good old Sir John Day (the Catholic judge),
who sat next me on the platform. "Why on earth doesn't somebody stop
him?" he whispered to me in a loud "aside," as the eloquent Jesuit "let
himself go" on the subject of the Pope and the King. On the other
hand, I heard the Wesleyan Mayor, who was in the chair, murmur to _his_
{38} neighbour, "This is eloquence indeed!" "Vocal relief" (as the
reporters say at classical concerts) was afforded by a capital choir,
which sang with amazing energy, "Faith of our Fathers," and Faber's
sentimental hymn, the opening words of which--"Full in the pant" ...
are apt to call forth irreverent smiles.
I took Bernard Vaughan (who knew little of Oxford) a walk round the
city on Sunday afternoon. We looked into one of the most "advanced"
churches, where a young curate, his biretta well on the back of his
head, was catechising a class of children. "Tell me, children," we
heard him say, "who was the first Protestant?" "The Devil, Father!"
came the shrill response. "Yes, quite right, the Devil!" and we left
the church much edified.
There was good music to be heard in Oxford in those early days of the
year; and I attended some enjoyable concerts with a music-loving member
of my Hall. The boy-prodigies, of whom there were several above the
horizon at this time, generally had good audiences at Oxford; and I
used to find something inexplicably uncanny in the attainments and
performances of these gifted youngsters--Russian, German and English.
Astonishing technique--as far as was possible for half-grown
fingers--one might fairly look for; but whence the _sehnsucht_, the
passionate yearning, that one seemed to find in some, at least, of
their interpretations? That they should feel it appears incredible:
yet it could not have been a mere imitative monkey-trick, a mere echo
of the teaching of their master. And why should there be this
precocious development in music alone, of all the arts? These things
want {39} explaining psychologically. I was amused at one of these
recitals to hear the eminent violinist Marie Hall (who happened to be
sitting next me) say that the boy (it was the Russian Mischa Elman)
could not possibly play Bazzini's _Ronde des Lutins_ (he did play it,
and admirably), and also that he had suddenly "struck," to the dismay
of his _impresario_, against appearing as a "wunderkind" in sailor kit
and short socks, and had insisted on a dress suit!
The Torpids were rowed in icy weather this year; I took Lady
Gainsborough and her daughter on to Queen's barge; and Queen's (in
which they were interested) made, with the help of two Rhodes Scholars,
two bumps, amid shouts of "Go it, _Quaggas_!"--a new _petit nom_ since
my time, when only the Halls had nicknames. Tuckwell, of an older
generation than mine, reports in his reminiscences how St. Edmund Hall,
in his time, was encouraged by cries from the bank of "On, St. Edmund,
on!" and not, as in these degenerate days, "Go it, Teddy!" It was a
novelty on the river to see the coaching done from bicycles instead of
from horseback. But bicycles were ubiquitous at Oxford, and doubtless
of the greatest service; and my young Benedictines and I went far
afield awheel on architectural and other excursions. Passing the
broken and battered park railings of beautiful Nuneham (not yet
repaired by Squire "Lulu"[1]), my companion commented on their
condition; and I told him the legend of the former owner, who was so
{40} disconsolate at the death of his betrothed (a daughter of Dean
Liddell) on their wedding-day, that he never painted or repaired his
park railings again!
I heard at the end of February of the engagement (concluded in a
beauty-spot of the Italian Riviera) of my young friend Bute--he would
not be twenty-four till June--to Augusta Bellingham. A boy-and-girl
attachment which had found its natural and happy conclusion--that was
the whole story, though the papers, of course, were full of impossibly
romantic tales about both the young people. They went off straight to
Rome, in Christian fashion, to ask the Pope's blessing on their
betrothal; and I just missed them there, for I had the happiness this
spring of another brief visit to Italy, at the invitation of a
Neapolitan friend. I spent two or three delightful weeks at the
Bertolini Palace, high above dear dirty Naples, with an entrancing view
over the sunlit bay, and Vesuvius (quite quiescent) in the background.
I found the city not much changed in thirty years, and, as always, much
more attractive than its queer and half-savage population. Watching
the cab-drivers trying to urge their lumbering steeds into a canter, I
thought how oddly different are the sounds employed by different
nations to make their horses go. The Englishman makes the well-known
untransferable click with his tongue: the Norwegian imitates the sound
of a kiss: the Arab rolls an r-r-r: the Neapolitan coachman _barks_
Wow! wow! wow! The subject is worth developing.
I met at Naples, among other people, Sir Charles Wyndham, with his
unmistakable "Criterion" voice, and as cynically amusing off the stage
as he generally {41} was on it. He reminded me of what I had
forgotten--that I had once shown him all over our Abbey at Fort
Augustus. I told him of a lecture Beerbohm Tree had recently given at
Oxford, and showed him my copy of a striking passage[2] which I had
transcribed from a shorthand note of the lecture. "Noble words," the
veteran actor agreed, "I know them well; but they were not written for
his Oxford lecture. I remember them a dozen or more years ago, in an
address he gave (I think in 1891) to the Playgoers' Club; and the last
clause ran--'to point _in the twilight of a waning century_ to the
greater light beyond.' Those words would not of course be applicable
in 1904."
I had looked forward to a day in the museum, with its wonderful
sculptures and unique relics of Pompeii; but I was lost there, for the
whole collection was being rearranged, and no catalogue available. The
Cathedral too was closed, being under restoration--for the sixth time
in six centuries! Some of the Neapolitan churches seemed to me sadly
wanting in internal order and cleanliness, an exception being a
spotless and perfectly-kept convent chapel on the hill, conveniently
near me for daily mass. The German Emperor made, with his customary
suddenness, a descent on Naples during {42} my stay. The quays and
streets were hastily decorated, and there was a ferment of excitement
everywhere; but I fled from the hurly-burly by cable-railway
(_funicoli-funicola!_) to the heights of San Martino, to visit the
desecrated and abandoned Certosa, now a "national monument": tourists
trampling about the lovely church with their hats on. It made me sick,
and I told the astonished guide so. The cloister garth, with its sixty
white marble columns, charmed and impressed me; but all _molto triste_.
Three old Carthusian monks, I heard, were still permitted to huddle in
some corner of their monastery till they dropped and died.[3]
A day I spent at Lucerne on my way home, in fog, snow, and sleet (no
sign of spring), I devoted partly to the "Kriegs-und-Frieden"
Museum--chiefly _kriegs!_ with an astonishingly complete collection of
all things appertaining to war. I went to Downside on my arrival in
England, had some talk with the kind abbot on Fort Augustus affairs,
and admired the noble church, a wonderful landmark with its lofty
tower, choir now quite complete externally, and _chevet_ of flanking
chapels. I got to Arundel in time for the functions of Holy Week, and
thought I had seen nothing more beautiful in Italy than St. Philip's
great church on Maundy Thursday, its "chapel of repose" bright with
lilies, azaleas and tulips, tall silver candlesticks and hangings of
rose-coloured velvet. I had landed in {43} England speechless with a
cold caught at Lucerne, and could neither sing nor preach. Summer Term
at Oxford opened with a snowstorm, and May Day was glacial. I found I
had been elected to the new County Club, a good house with a really
charming garden, and (to paraphrase Angelo Cyrus Bantam) "rendered
bewitching by the absence of ---- undergraduates, who have an
amalgamation of themselves at the Union." The most noteworthy visitor
to the Union this term was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (then leader of
the Opposition), who made a somewhat vitriolic speech, lasting an hour,
against the Government. The 550 undergraduates present listened,
cheered frequently--and voted against him by a large majority, a good
deal (I heard afterwards) to the old gentleman's chagrin.
The Archbishop of Westminster (Dr. Bourne) came to Oxford in May as the
guest of Mgr. Kennard, who illuminated in his honour the garden and
quad of his pretty old house in St. Aldate's, and gave a dinner and big
reception, at neither of which I could be present, being laid up from a
bicycle-accident. It was Eights-week, and his Grace saw the races one
evening, and I think was also present at a Newman Society debate, when
a motion advocating the setting up of a Catholic University in Ireland
by the Government was rejected by a considerable majority.[4] I was
able to hobble to Balliol a few days later, when Sir Victor Horsley
delivered {44} the Boyle lecture to a crowded and distinguished
audience. I noted down as interesting one thing he said (I fancy it
was a quotation from somebody else[5]): "Every scientific truth passes
through three stages: in the first it is decried as absurd; in the
second it is said to be opposed to revealed religion; in the third
everybody knew it before!" Sir Victor's lecture left me, rightly or
wrongly, under the impression that he was something of a sceptic; and I
asked my neighbour, a clerical don of note, from Keble, why so many
medical bigwigs seemed inclined to atheism. He answered (oddly enough)
that it was only what David had prophesied long ago when he asked
despairingly (Psalm lxxxvii. 11), _Numquid medici suscitabunt et
confitebuntur tibi?_ ("Shall the physicians rise up and praise
Thee?")--a curious little bit of exegesis from an Anglican.[6]
June 16 was a busy day--a garden party at Blenheim, with special trains
for the Oxford guests; the Duchess, in blue and white and a big black
hat, welcoming her guests in her low, sweet, and curiously un-American
voice, and the little Duke rather affable in khaki (he was encamped
with the Oxfordshire Hussars in the park). We sat about under the big
cedars, and there was organ-music in the cool {45} white library, where
I noticed that Sargent's very odd group of the ducal family had been
hung--with not altogether happy effect--as a pendant to the famous and
beautiful group painted by Reynolds. I got back to Oxford just in time
for the festival dinner of the Canning and Chatham Clubs, at which my
old schoolfellow Alfred Lyttelton, Hugh Cecil, and other Tory
notabilities, were guests. Alfred spoke admirably: Hugh, though loudly
called upon, refused to speak at all. The President of Magdalen, by
whom I sat, told me in pained tones how some Christ Church
undergraduates, _suadente diabolo_, had recently scaled the wall into
Magdalen deer-park, had dragged (Heaven knew how) over the wall two of
our sacrosanct fallow deer, and had turned the poor brutes loose in the
"High"--an outrage without precedent in the college annals. I duly
sympathized.
A feature of Catholic and Benedictine interest in this year's
Commemoration was the conferring of the honorary doctorate of letters
on my old friend and fellow-novice, Dom Germain Morin, the
distinguished patristic scholar.[7] I did _not_ attend the hot and
tiresome Encaenia, but I went to the Magdalen concert, where I found
myself talking between the songs to Lady Winchilsea, whose husband and
brother-in-law had been friends of mine at Eton, and had acted with me,
I think, in more than one school play. The lady was born a Harcourt,
{46} and talked interestingly about beautiful Nuneham in the days of
her girlhood. I met her again next day at Radley College, where the
annual "gaudy" was always a pleasant wind-up to the summer term. It
turned wet, and the usual concert was given, not _al fresco_, but in
the fine old panelled schoolroom with its open roof, once Sir George
Bowyer's barn.[8] Two days later I kept yet another "silver jubilee"
(following naturally on that of my receiving the Benedictine habit),
namely the anniversary of my religious profession. Being in London, I
spent the day with what piety was possible, in the Dominican monastery
at Haverstock Hill, attending high mass in the beautiful church, dining
with the good friars, and sitting awhile in their pretty shady garden.
One of the fathers told me of a notice he had personally seen affixed
to a pillar in Milan Cathedral in 1899. I copied it forthwith, as one
of the funniest things of the kind which I had ever seen. Here it is
_verbatim_:--
APPELE TO CHARITABLES.--The Brothers (so-called of Mercy) ask some
slender Arms for their Hospital They harbour all kinds of diseases, and
have no respect for religion.
I met this evening my nephew Kelburne, R.N., who had just been
appointed first lieutenant on {47} H.M.S. _Renown_ (which was to take
the Prince and Princess of Wales to India); he was looking forward to a
good spell of leave and plenty of sport in the East. He seemed very
keen on polo, and amused me with a yarn about his (naval) team having
been offered L50 if they would kill Winston Churchill in their coming
match against the House of Commons![9] The event of July was Bute's
wedding in Ireland on the 6th. I travelled straight to Castle
Bellingham two days previously, with Bute's Scots pipers in my train,
much admired by the populace. I found, of course, the little Louth
village, and indeed the whole countryside, _en fete_. The bride-elect,
in inviting me, had spoken about "a quiet wedding at home"; but how was
that possible? for the day could not be other than a popular festival
to the warm-hearted folk among whom "Miss Augusta" had spent all her
life. The wedding guests, bidden and unbidden, converged on the little
country church in every imaginable conveyance, from special trains and
motor-cars to the humble donkey-cart. The marriage service was simple
and devout, the officiant being neither cardinal nor bishop, but the
bride's own parish priest, while the music was grave plain-chant,
perfectly rendered, with an exquisite motett by Palestrina. The royal
Stuart tartan worn by the bridegroom, and the vivid St. Patrick's blue
of the bridesmaids' cloaks and hoods, made a picturesque splash of
colour against the masses of pure white lilies and marguerites with
which the church was {48} decorated. Most picturesque of all was the
going-away of the happy pair from the little fishing-harbour, whither
they were preceded, accompanied, and followed by troops of friends.
Embarking in a white barge manned by oarsmen in the Bellingham
liveries, they were rowed out to the steamer which was to take them
across the sea to their honeymoon in Galloway. The pipers, following
in another barge, played "Johnnie Stuart's gone awa'"; the band on the
pier struck up "Come Back to Erin"; and amid cheers and tears and
acclamations and blessings the white boat turned the corner of the
pierhead and glided out over the rippling sunlit waters. We were
regaled afterwards with some delightful part-singing by a famous Dublin
choir on the castle lawn. Next day I departed with the Loudouns for
Belfast, where it rained as it _can_ rain only in Ireland, and I
thought of one of Lady Dufferin's charming letters from the south of
France to her Irish relatives:--
"O that I could transport a bit of that Provence sky which I have been
enjoying, over your dear, dripping heads in Ireland! It is a terrible
drawback on the goods of life at home to lead a web-foot existence. I
sometimes fancy that I could put up with any amount of despotic
monarchy taken warm, with Burgundy, rather than the British
constitution, with all that cold water!"
We crossed to Stranraer in rain and mist, but found the sun shining in
Galloway. The Loudouns went on to Ayrshire, and I to visit my niece at
Dunskey, the new house which already looked old, with much dark oak,
good pictures, and fine old prints everywhere. I liked the long and
lofty terrace in front, commanding a beautiful view of the blue {49}
curve of the Irish Sea, the Mourne Mountains in the background, and,
far to the south-westward, the Isle of Man[10] hanging like an azure
cloud on the horizon. Everywhere round my dear old home,[11] in farms
and village, gardens and woods, were signs of the changes and
improvements wrought by the late owner, who had barely lived to see
them. _Sic vos non vobis_, I sadly said to myself, as I stood on the
point between the two bays at the foot of Dunskey Glen (his chosen
resting-place), and looked at the simple granite cross rising above the
brackens and heather. Portpatrick I found changed out of knowledge,
with its red-roofed houses, electric light, golf-course, and big hotel
on the brow of the hill. _Tout passe_. I had loved the quiet
old-world village of my childhood, but I could not grudge the place its
new prosperity, and all was full of interest to me. From Dunskey I
went on to Kelburne and Loudoun Castle--the latter big, imposing and
bare, and a little suggestive of Castle Carabas! though new pictures
and redecoration did much, later on, to improve the interior. My
examination-week at the Dumfries convent followed, diversified by an
interesting visit to the local madhouse (euphemistically known as the
"Crichton Royal Institution"), {50} said to be the finest lunatic
asylum in Britain; with splendid buildings, in perfect condition, 800
acres of fertile land, and the same number of patients, from country
gentlemen to paupers. The high wall round the establishment was being
replaced by a hedge, and the attendants were kept out of sight as much
as possible, in accordance with the modern theory of not letting
lunatics know that they were under restraint.[12] The luxuriousness of
the whole place, in comparison with the home surroundings of most of
the inmates, was very noticeable; and the spectacle of a "doited"
farm-labourer seated in an arm-chair in a carpeted lounge, reading the
_Graphic_ upside down, was certainly curious, if not instructive.
I paid a visit to Eton this summer, on the occasion of the laying of
the foundation of the South African war memorial by Princess Alexander
of Teck (her husband and brother were both Etonians), who looked
charming all in ivory white, with a long plume of Eton blue in her hat.
The school O.T.C. formed the guard of honour, the only _contretemps_
being that several of the youthful warriors were overcome by the heat,
dropping down in the ranks one after another, like so many ninepins.
The new building was to occupy the site of "m' tutors" ("the tallest
house in college," he had said to me on my first arrival, "as I am the
tallest master!"), and I walked {51} through the hideous building for
the last time--_memor temporis acti_--before going on to the head
master's party in his charming garden sloping down to the river--a
farewell function, as Dr. Warre was resigning the head mastership to
Edward Lyttelton this half, and several masters were leaving with him.
I went to London from Eton to attend Hyde's marriage to Miss Somers
Cocks, and (though the season was over) met many friends afterwards at
Lady Dudley's house in Carlton-gardens, where the wedding guests
foregathered.
A visit to Arundel a little later was signalized by great festivities
in honour of the birth of the Duke's little daughter. The four
thousand guests who, as the fancy took them, danced in the tilting-yard
(converted into a great open-air ballroom), listened to martial music
from military bands, roamed through the beautiful state-rooms, or gazed
admiringly at the myriad fairy lamps which glowed many-coloured on
castle walls, battlements, and towers, were literally of every class.
Peers and peeresses, officers and deans and doctors, and Sussex county
magnates, mingled freely with the farmers, artisans, and workmen who
were their fellow-guests. The fete wound up with a grand display of
fireworks in the park, and the host and hostess (the latter looking
very nice in her white summer frock, with flowing crimson sash and a
string of great pearls round her neck), made every one happy with their
affability and kindness.
On my way north I stayed a few days with the Gainsboroughs at Exton,
near Oakham--my first visit to the little shire of Rutland. A most
attractive place, I thought: a charming modern Jacobean {52} house (the
ruins of the Elizabethan hall, burnt down a century before, stood close
by): beautiful gardens and a nobly-timbered park, in which stands the
fine old parish church with its singularly graceful spire. Tennis, _al
fresco_ teas, and much music, occupied a few days very agreeably; and I
then went on to St. Andrews for my usual autumn sojourn, which I always
enjoyed. But my most memorable Scottish visit this autumn was to
Abbotsford, which, curiously enough, I had never yet seen, though I had
known its owners for thirty years. My grandfather and Sir Walter Scott
had been friends for many years: they were planning and building at the
same time their respective homes in the western and eastern Lowlands,
and often exchanged visits and letters. Here is a little note
(undated) in which Sir Walter acknowledged, with an apt Shakespearian
reference, a gift of game from Blairquhan:--
My Dear Sir David,--
I thank you much for your kind present. The pheasants arrived in
excellent condition, and showing, like Shakespeare's Yeomen, "the
mettle of their pasture."[13]
When are you and Lady Blair going to take another run down Tweed?
Your obliged humble servant,
WALTER SCOTT.
My father had stayed at Abbotsford as a little boy, before he entered
the Navy, and two or three years before Sir Walter's death in 1832. He
had not the customary reminiscence of having sat on {53} the great
man's knee;[14] but he remembered a beautiful collie which lay outside
the study door, and refused to let any one enter in his master's
absence. We were all brought up on Scott--his _Tales of a
Grandfather_, his novels and poems. My father seemed to know the
latter all by heart: he would reel them off (with fine elocution, too)
by the hour, and we children loved the stirring music of the Border
songs, the _Lady of the Lake_ and the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which
only in our later and more sophisticated days suggested the answer to a
flippant conundrum.[15]
To me, of course, Abbotsford had, and has, a special and peculiar
charm, as having been for more than sixty years one of the "Catholic
Homes of Scotland."[16] The "incongruous pile" sneered at by Ruskin,
the bizarre architecture which, I suppose, made Dean Stanley describe
it as a place to be visited once and never again, are open to criticism
and easily criticized. I prefer the judgment of Andrew Lang, that "it
is hallowed ground, and one may not judge it by common standards." To
{54} Catholics it is doubly hallowed--as a Catholic centre in the sweet
Border-land which Scott knew and loved so well, and as the "darling
seat" of one who by the magic of his writings made the Catholic past of
Scotland live again, and the last words on whose dying lips were lines
from two of the noblest and most sacred hymns in the Catholic
liturgy.[17]
The Dowager Lady Bute was the occupant of Abbotsford during my visit
there, and had hoped to make it her home for some time; but her stay
was cut short by a serious motor accident, in which she and her
daughter sustained rather severe injuries. I was at the time at
Dumfries House, where Bute and his bride were happily settled for the
autumn; and there was of course great concern at the Abbotsford
disaster, which fortunately turned out less grave than was at first
feared. I was interested in the recent additions to Dumfries House,
including a fine Byzantine chapel, a saloon lit from the roof for the
Stair tapestries,[18] and a new library-billiard-room, all so cleverly
tucked in by the architect behind the existing wings, that the
beautiful Adam front remains as it was. Lady Bute, smartly frocked,
and twinkling with diamonds, sapphires, and ropes of pearls, was quite
"Lothair's bride." On Sunday we had the regulation walk to the lovely
old garden, stables, farm, and poultry-yard. A great {55} "wale" of
cocks and hens,[19] among which our hostess dropped one of her
priceless earrings, and we had a long hunt for it. Reading my Glasgow
paper in the train next day, on my way south, I came on a paragraph
announcing the "reception into the Roman Church" of the Professor of
Greek (J. S. Phillimore) at Glasgow University--a Christ Church man,
and a scholar of the highest distinction. What (I thought) will the
"unco guid" of Glasgow say now?[20]
[1] Sir William Harcourt's son, commonly known as "Lulu" (now Viscount
Harcourt), had lately inherited Nuneham on the death of his father.
[2] It ran as follows: "In an age when faith is tinged with philosophic
doubt, when love is regarded but as a spasm of the nervous system, and
life itself as but the refrain of a music-hall song, I believe that it
is still the function of art to give us light rather than darkness.
Its teaching should not be to prove that we are descended from monkeys,
but rather to remind us of our affinity with the angels. Its mission
is not to lead us through the fogs of doubt into the bogs of despair,
but to point us to the greater light beyond."
[3] On what principle, I could not help asking myself, are
Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits (all engaged in
active work, and therefore _ex hypothesi_ dangerous), freely tolerated
in Rome, and Carthusians (whose only occupation is prayer) expelled
from Naples?
[4] On a previous occasion our Catholic Society had voted on the same
motion in precisely the contrary sense. But the opinions of the
"Newman," as of all university debating societies (not excluding the
Union), were quite fluid and indeterminate on almost every subject.
[5] Sir Charles Lyell, I am inclined to believe. But I cannot "place"
the quotation.
[6] Curious; because the Authorized translation (presumably used at
Keble) ignores the _medici_ altogether, its version being "Shall the
dead arise and praise Thee?" There is, I fancy, some authority for my
friend's interpretation; still, the context seems to show clearly that
_suscitabunt_ means "rise from the dead," and that what the words
convey is that dead doctors, like other dead men, are done with
praising God anyhow in this world.
[7] A monk of the abbey of Maredsous, in Belgium, but by birth a
Norman, a native of Caen. He was somewhat of the destructive school of
patristic critics, and I once heard it said that Dom Germain would not
die happy until he had proved to his own satisfaction that all the
supposed writings of St. Augustine were spurious!
[8] Radley House, his birthplace, had been sold to the college some
years before by Sir George Bowyer, the eminent Catholic jurist and
writer, who had preceded Manning into the Church in 1850, and who built
the beautiful church annexed to the Catholic Hospital in Great Ormond
Street (removed later to St. John's Wood). I well remember in my early
Catholic days (I think about 1876) the excitement caused by the
expulsion of Sir George--whose strongly-expressed views on the Roman
question and other matters were highly distasteful to British
Liberals--from the Reform Club.
[9] I think I heard afterwards that the sailors got him off his pony
once or twice; but the reward was not earned, and he lived to become
First Lord of the Admiralty just three years later!
[10] Only visible in the clearest weather. From a point farther south
(the Mull of Galloway) could be descried also, across the Solway Firth,
the Cumberland hills; and my grandfather, standing there, used to say
that he could see five kingdoms--the kingdom of Scotland, the kingdom
of Ireland, the kingdom of England, the kingdom of Man, and the kingdom
of Heaven!
[11] I had inherited Dunskey nearly fifty years before, on my
grandfather's death (1857). The place was bought in 1900 by Charles
Orr Ewing, M.P., who married my niece, the Glasgows' eldest daughter.
[12] A theory which, reduced to practice, had its disadvantages. I
remember Lord Rosebery writing to the papers complaining that the
lunatics of Epsom, finding no difficulty, under the new and improved
system, in escaping from duress, used occasionally to saunter from the
local asylum into his grounds, and, I think, even his house, near by.
[13] The reference, of course, is to _King Henry V._, Act iii., Sc. 2:
"And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture."
[14] My dear old cousin Felicia Skene, whose father had been one of
Scott's closest friends, told me that this had been her privilege. So
also did the late George Boyle, sometime Dean of Salisbury, who,
however, in his autobiography, speaks merely of having once seen Sir
Walter (looking very old and ill) when he came to call on his (the
Dean's) father.
[15] "If you happened to find an egg on a music-stool, what poem would
it remind you of?"
[16] James Hope Scott, the eminent parliamentary lawyer, friend of
Newman, Manning and Gladstone, and husband of Sir Walter's
granddaughter and eventual heiress, made his submission to Rome in
1851. His daughter Mary Monica (afterwards Hon. Mrs. Joseph Maxwell
Scott), inherited Abbotsford at his death; and it is now owned by her
son, General Walter Maxwell Scott.
[17] The _Dies Irae_ and the _Stabat Mater_. See Lockhart, _Life of
Walter Scott_ (2nd Ed.), vol. x., p. 215.
[18] From the looms of Gobelin: presented by Louis XIV. to an Earl of
Stair, British Ambassador in Paris. They had come into the Dumfries
(Bute) family through the marriage of a son of the first Earl of Stair
to Penelope, Countess of Dumfries in her own right. It was a standing
grievance of our old friend the tenth Earl of Stair that these
tapestries were not at Lochinch.
[19] "Wale"=choice, or selection. A Fife laird, driving home across
Magus Moor after dining not wisely but too well, fell out of his gig,
and his wig fell off, but was recovered by his servant. "It's no' ma
wig, Davie, it's no' ma wig," he moaned as he lay in the mire,
thrusting the peruke away. "You'd best take it, sir," said the
serving-man dryly; "_there's nae wale o' wigs on Magus Moor_."
[20] They said much that was nasty, but they could not oust the
professor (though they tried their best) from his professorship. _Au
contraire_, he received promotion soon afterwards, being elected to the
Chair of Humanity; and a protest organized by certain bigots was
allowed to "lie on the table"--i.e., went into the waste-paper basket.
{56}
CHAPTER IV
1905-1906
An event of Benedictine interest in the autumn of 1905, and one which
attracted many visitors to Downside, our beautiful abbey among the
Mendip Hills, was the long-anticipated opening of the choir of the
great church. Special trains, an overflowing guest-house, elaborate
services, many congratulatory speeches, and much monastic hospitality,
were, as customary on such occasions, the order of the day.
Architecturally, I confess that I found the new choir disappointing: it
but confirmed the impression (which after many years had become a
conviction with me) that the art of building a real Gothic church on a
grand scale is lost, gone beyond hope of recovery. _Ecce signum!_
Design, material, workmanship all admirable, and the result, alas!
lifeless, as lifeless as (say) the modern cathedrals of Truro and
Liverpool and Edinburgh, the nave of Bristol, and the great church of
Our Lady at Cambridge. I have seen Downside compared with Lichfield:
nay, some one (greatly daring) placed pictures of them side by side in
some magazine. Vain comparison! Lichfield, built long centuries ago,
is _alive_ still--instinct with the life breathed into it by its
unknown creators in the ages of faith; but these great modern Gothic
churches seem to me {57} to have never lived at all, to have come into
existence still-born. No: Gothic architecture, in this century of
ours, is dead. Such life as it has is a simulated, imitative,
galvanized life, which is no more real life than the tunes ground out
of a pianola or a gramophone are real living music.[1] "'Tis true,
'tis pity: pity 'tis, 'tis true."
Another engagement which I had in the west about this time was to
preach at the opening of the new Benedictine church at Merthyr Tydvil.
Bishop Hedley and I travelled thither together from Cardiff, through a
country which God made extremely pretty, with its deep glens and hills
covered with {58} bracken and heather, but which man, in search of
coal, has blackened and defaced to an incredible extent: the whole
district, of course, a hive of industry. Lying in bed at night, I saw
through my blindless window the flames belching from a score of
furnace-chimneys down the valley, and thought what it must be to spend
one's life in such surroundings. A curious change to find oneself next
day in the verdant environment of Cardiff Castle, where, once within
the gates, one might be miles away from coalpits and from the great
industrial city close by. My room was the _quondam_ nursery, of which
the walls had been charmingly decorated by the fanciful genius of
William Burges (the restorer of the castle), with scenes from
children's fairy stories--Jack the Giant-killer and Cinderella and Red
Riding-hood and the rest, tripping round in delightful procession. The
Welsh metropolis was _en fete_ on the day of my arrival, in honour of
the town having become a city, and its mayor a lord-mayor; and Lord
Bute was giving a big luncheon to civic and other magnates in the
beautiful banqueting hall, adorned with historic frescoes and rich
stained glass. The family was smiling gently, during my visit, at the
news published "from a reliable source," that my young host was to be
the new Viceroy of Ireland. Another report, equally "reliable" (odious
word!) published, a little later, his portrait and not very eventful
biography, as that of the just-appointed Under-Foreign Secretary. Why
not Lord Chancellor or Commander-in-chief at once? one was as likely as
the other.
The reference to the commander-in-chief reminds me that the Oxford
Union was honoured this {59} (October) term by a visit from Lord
Roberts, who gave us a very informing lecture, illustrated with many
maps, on the N.W. frontier of India and was received by a crowded house
with positive shouts of welcome.[2] Almost equally well received, a
week later, was Lord Hugh Cecil, who had held no office in the Union in
his undergraduate days, but had often since taken part in its debates.
His theme on this occasion was the interminable fiscal question; and
the curiously poignant and personal note in his oratory appealed, as it
always did, to his youthful hearers, who supported him with their votes
as well as their applause.
A little later there was a great audience in the Town Hall, to hear Joe
Chamberlain inveigh against the new Government,[3] and preach _his_
fiscal gospel. He was in excellent form, and looked nothing like
seventy, though his long speech--his last, I think, before his great
break-down--certainly aged him visibly. A little incident at the
opening showed his undiminished aptitude for ready repartee. He
announced his intention of treating Tariff Reform from the Imperial
standpoint, adding, "I am not going to deal with the subject from the
economic side"; and then, as a derisive "Yah!" broke from some
disgruntled Liberals at the back of the hall, going on without a
moment's hesitation--"not, however, for the reason which I see suggests
itself to some of the _acuter_ minds among my audience!"
{60}
S---- H----, whom I found waiting to see me when I got home from the
Town Hall, told me that after two years in the Catholic Church he was
thinking of returning to the flesh-pots of Anglicanism, and said (among
other foolish things) that he had "a Renaissance mind!" I ventured to
remind him that he had also an immortal soul. How to increase his
income seemed his chief preoccupation; and he did not "see his way"
(that fatal phrase again!) to do this as a "practising" Catholic.
Wilfrid Ward, the Editor of the _Dublin Review_, had recently started a
"dining-and-debating-club" in London with a rather interesting
membership; and I went up in November to read a paper on "Catholics at
the National Universities." I was less "heckled" than I expected; but
there was some "good talk" (as old Johnson would have said), and I
enjoyed the evening. Less enjoyable was another evening spent with our
Architectural Society at Oxford, to hear a lecture by Wells (fellow and
future Warden) of Wadham, on "Tudor Oxford" an interesting topic, and
treated by a man who knew his subject, but disfigured by strongly
Protestant interpolations about monks, Jesuits, and "Bloody Mary," much
out of place in an address to a quite "undenominational" society. It
recalled another paper read to us on the inoffensive subject of
"Bells." The reader on that occasion adroitly founded on the text of
the inscriptions on church bells a violent diatribe against the
invocation of saints and other "mediaeval corruptions," to the intense
annoyance of my little friend the Master of Pembroke (himself an
Anglican bishop), who sat next me, and whom I with difficulty
restrained until {61} the end of the lecture from rising to protest, as
he ultimately did with some warmth, against "turning an archaeological
address into a polemical sermon."
Term over, I made my way north to Beaufort, arriving there just in time
to assist at the unveiling in the village square of Beauly, of the
Lovat Scouts' Memorial, for which I had written the inscription.[4] A
pretty function, with much local enthusiasm, an excellent speech from
The Mackintosh, our new Lord Lieutenant, and of course the inevitable
"cake and wine" banquet, at which I toasted Lovat. Christmas followed,
with a big and merry family party, the usual seasonable revels, and
some delightful singing from the wife of a Ross-shire laird, an
American lady with a well-trained voice of astonishing sweetness and
compass. The New Year found the whole country agog about the coming
General Election; and at Arundel, whither I went from Beaufort, I heard
Lady Edmund Talbot falsify Johnson's cynical dictum[5] by making an
excellent {62} speech on behalf of her husband, who was laid up in
London. He retained his seat for Chichester by a good majority; and
"dear little Wigtownshire" remained faithful to a lost cause, returning
Lord Stair's eldest son.[6] But on the whole the "Radical reaction,"
"turn of the tide," "swing of the pendulum"--whichever you liked to
call it--was complete, the very first victim of the _debacle_ being my
brother-in-law, Charles Dalrymple, who was dismissed at Ipswich, after
twenty years' service, by nearly 2,000 votes. He had been given a
Privy Councillorship by the outgoing Government; but this poorly
compensated him for being ousted from the House of Commons, which had
been his "nursing mother" for nearly forty years.[7] Manchester was
absolutely swept by the Liberals, poor Sir James Fergusson going to
join his brother in limbo, and Arthur Balfour being beaten by a larger
majority than either of them. The final result showed--Radical members
returned, 378, against 156 Unionists. The new Ministry put educational
reform in the front of their programme; and we Catholics, with a
section of Anglicans (for they were by no means united on the subject),
organized meetings in advance against the nefarious projects of the
Government. I attended some of them, and heard many speeches, {63}
some of them terribly long and "stodgy." A Hampshire parson, by whom I
sat at one of these dreary meetings, told me, by way of illustrating
the educational standard of his peasant parishioners, that a bridegroom
would thus render the promise in the marriage-service: "With my body I
thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou!" While the
bride's version of _her_ promise would be: "To 'ave an' to 'old from
this day fortnight for betterer 'orse, for richerer power, in
siggerness 'ealth, to love cherries and to bay!" I copied these
interesting formulas into my note-book on the spot.
I was happily able to escape, at the end of term, from these political
alarums and excursions to the Continent. I longed for Italy; but the
friend who accompanied me (and financed us both) insisted on carrying
me to Nice--a place I never loved; and it proved sunless, the palms
shivering in a mistral and we shivering in sympathy. I used to escape
the odious Promenade des Anglais (much more a Promenade des Allemands)
by climbing the steep steps into old-world Nizza, and talking to the
good simple folk, who (so the parish priest assured me) remained devout
and pious, and wonderfully little affected by the manners and morals of
the objectionable crowd which haunts Nice more than any other spot on
the _Cote d'Azur_, except, I suppose, Monte Carlo. The latter resort
we eschewed (my friend and host was no gambler), but we had many
strolls through the toy-city of Monaco, where the tourist is little in
evidence. I noticed, crowning the picturesque promontory, the new
cathedral built by M. Blanc out of casino profits, which the
ecclesiastical {64} authorities accepted, I suppose, on the principle
of the good old maxim, _Non olet!_[8] We took a run to Milan before
turning homewards, and after an hour in the cathedral--impressively
vast, but not (to my thinking) impressively beautiful, either without
or within--spent a long day in exploring the far more interesting
churches of SS. Maurizio, Maria delle Grazie, Vittore, Lorenzo,
Giorgio, and Ambrogio, every one well worth visiting, and the
last-named unique, of course, in charm and interest.[9] Turin, where
we stayed a day, was wet and cold; but the arcades which line the chief
streets at least keep the rain off. At Paris the sun was actually
shining, and the trees on the boulevards sprouting greenly. I read in
the English papers here of the engagement of my nephew Kelburn (the
family had only recently dropped the final e from both the title and
the castle)[10] to a Miss Hyacinth Bell, whose pretty floral name
conveyed nothing to me. The {65} new Minister of Education[11] had
also published his "Birreligious" Bill (as some wags nicknamed it): it
seemed to satisfy nobody--least of all, of course, Catholics.
I spent Easter, as usual, at Arundel, where a gathering of Maxwells
(the Duchess's young relatives) made the big house cheerful and
homelike. The summer term at Oxford was an uneventful one, the most
interesting event that I recall being our annual Canning and Chatham
dinner, with a more distinguished gathering than usual. Lord Milner
made a remarkable and interesting speech in reply to the toast of "The
Empire," and "Smith of Wadham," M.P. (the future Lord Chancellor), was
also very eloquent. The Duke of Leinster (then up at Balliol), who sat
next me, spoke of the hereditary good relations between his family and
Maynooth College, and amused me by saying that he thought it must be
"much more interesting" to be a Catholic in England than in Ireland! I
motored some of my young Benedictines over to Blenheim one day; and we
were, with other sight-seers, escorted over the show-part of the
palace. The little Duke burst in on us in one state-room, and retired
precipitately, banging the door with an audible "D--n!" "His Grace the
Dook of Marlborough!" announced, without turning a hair, the solemn
butler who was acting as showman; and our party was, of course, duly
impressed.
{66}
I was summoned this summer to three weddings, all of interest to me,
the first being that of my nephew Kelburn, a pretty country function in
Surrey. The Bishop of Worcester tied the knot--"impressively," as the
reporters say (but why cannot an Anglican dignitary read the Bible
without "mouthing" it?), and I afterwards found in his wife, Lady
Barbara Yeatman-Biggs, an old friend of my childhood.[12] Many
relatives, of course, were present here, and also, ten days later, in
the Chelsea church where Archdeacon Sinclair ("genial and impressive,"
the newspapers called _him_) united my younger sister, _en secondes
noces_, to Captain Cracroft Jarvis. I spent the evening of her wedding
in the House of Commons, where I had a mind to see our famous new
Radical Parliament-men gathered together. A very "scratch lot" they
seemed to me to be; and Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, whom I found beside
me in the D.S.G., seemed as little impressed as myself by their
"carryings-on." His Grace was so pleased with Carlyle's definition, or
description, of the House, which I quoted to him (he was apparently
unfamiliar with it), that he promptly copied it down in his note-book:
"a high-soaring, hopelessly-floundering, ever-babbling, inarticulate,
dumb dark entity!"
My third wedding was a picturesque Irish {67} one--that of Ninian
Crichton Stuart to Lord Gormanston's only daughter, with, of course, a
large party of Butes and Prestons gathered at Gormanston Castle, a huge
pile mostly modern; but the quaint little chapel, Jacobean Gothic
without and Empire style within, gaily adorned with lilies,
marguerites, and trailing smilax, dates from 1687.[13] It was far too
small to hold the wedding guests, who perforce remained on the lawn
outside. I walked with our host, later in the day, in the splendidly
timbered park, and the great picturesque untidy Irish garden; and he
held forth on the hardship of having to live uncomfortably in Ireland
after the luxury of Colonial governorships. "_Ireland!_ a rotten old
country, only fit, as some one said, to dig up and use as a
top-dressing for England!" was the summing-up of his lordship, whose
ancestors had owned the land on which we were walking for some seven
centuries.[14] I thought his bemoanings rather pathetic; but he amused
me by his recital of a prescription for "The Salvation of Ireland"
which once appeared (anonymously) in a northern newspaper. "Drain your
Bogs--Fat more Hogs--Lots more Lime--Lots more Chalk--LOTS MORE
WORK--LOTS LESS TALK!"
I returned to Oxford in time for Commemoration, at {68} which Lord
Milner and Mgr. Duchesne, two of our be-doctored guests, were very
warmly received; attended the big luncheon in All Souls' library, where
the agreeable ladies who sat on my right and left were totally unknown
to me; and drank coffee in the sunlit quad, where a band played and I
met many friends. Next day I took ship at Southampton (a noisy, shaky,
creaky ship it was) for Guernsey, on a visit to my brother, who was in
command of the Gunners there. I thought the approach to the island
very pretty on a still summer morning: quaint houses and church towers
climbing the hill among trees and gardens, with a foreground of white
sails and blue sea. Very pretty too was "Ordnance House" and its old
garden, with hedges of golden calceolarias and other attractions. I
spent a pleasant week here, delighted with the rocky coast (reminding
me of my native Wigtownshire) and the luxuriant gardens, especially
that of the Lieutenant-Governor, whose charming house (he occupied Lord
de Saumarez's seat) was full, as was to be expected,[15] of beautiful
naval prints and other relics. Of a morning I would walk down to Fort
Cornet--part of it of great antiquity--and watch my brother's guns at
sea-target practice, till my head ached with the roar and concussion.
The shooting was excellent, but the electric firing-apparatus
occasionally went wrong, which might be awkward in battle! I was
interested in the fine fifteenth-century parish church of St.
Peter-Port, of flamboyant Gothic: the effect of the interior {69}
nave-arches rising almost from the ground, with hardly any pillars, is
most singular.
I had to hurry back to "the adjacent island of Great Britain" (as the
Cumbrae minister put it),[16] to attend the jubilee dinner in London of
St. Elisabeth's Catholic Hospital, with Norfolk in the chair: a great
success, owing, I think, to the unusual circumstance that dinner and
wine were provided gratis, the result being much-enhanced subscriptions
from the grateful banqueters. I was present a little later at the
coming-of-age celebrations of Lord Gainsborough's son and heir at
Campden, the beautiful Jacobean family seat on the Cotswold slopes. We
sat down seventy to dinner on the evening of Campden's birthday; and
the youth acquitted himself excellently of what I consider (and I have
had some experience of majority banquets, including my own) one of the
most embarrassing tasks which can fall to any young man's lot. I,
being unexpectedly assigned the easier duty of replying for the
visitors, utilized the admirably appropriate opening which I had heard
not long before from the witty and eloquent American Ambassador,[17] at
the dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, and which was _not_ a "chestnut"
then, whatever it may be now.
From Campden I went on to Leamington to visit {70} another brother, who
had invited me to witness the Warwick Pageant, I think the first, and
certainly the most effective and successful, of these spectacles, for
which the craze was just beginning to spread through England. The
dramatic episodes at Warwick were not always dramatic, and the dialogue
and acting were perhaps not quite worthy of the superb surroundings;
but the setting of the spectacle was absolutely perfect. Behind us the
towers and battlements of the feudal castle rose above the woods: on
our right the giant oaks of the park, in their glorious midsummer
foliage: to our left the Avon glistening like a ribbon of burnished
silver; and in front, beyond a great expanse of verdant lawn (the
"stage" of the pageant), a prospect of enchanting wooded glades and
long-drawn sylvan avenues, down which came the long processions of
players, mounted and afoot, with singular and striking effect. Lord
and Lady Willoughby de Broke, who appeared (with the splendidly mounted
members of their hunt) as Louis XI. and Margaret of Scotland, were
conspicuous, if only because the former acted his part and spoke his
lines best of the whole company. The concerted singing was quite
charming; and charming, too, the spectacle of the hundred boys of the
famous old Warwick Grammar-school, in their pretty dresses of russet
and gold, and their masters costumed as old-world pedagogues.
Altogether a delightful and notable entertainment, which I was very
glad to have seen; and in other respects I enjoyed my visit, my brother
taking me to Kenilworth, Stoneleigh, Charlecote, and other interesting
places in that most interesting country. The August Bank-holiday found
me at Scarborough, {71} of all places in the world, spending the day
there with the two schoolboy sons of my host at a country house in the
East Riding. I recall, at the aquarium there, my interest on
discovering a "fact not generally known"--namely that fishes can, and
do, yawn. We saw a turbot yawn twice, and a cod once. The cod's yawn
was remarkable chiefly for its width, but the turbot's was much more
noteworthy. It begins at the lips, which open as if to suck in
water;[18] then the jaws distend themselves and so the yawn goes on,
works through the back of the head, stretching the plates of the skull
almost to cracking point, and finally comes out at the gills, which
open showing their red lining, and are inflated for a moment; and then,
with a gasping kind of shiver, the fish flattens out again, until, if
unusually bored, as it appeared to be by our presence, it relieves its
feelings by another yawn. I left my young friends to enjoy the varied
humours of the front; and climbing up (as I had done at Nice) "far from
the madding crowd," discovered many quaint and charming bits of old
Scarborough. A policeman told me that they reckoned that at least
120,000 visitors were in the town that day; and they all seemed
collected together to view the evening firework display above the Spa.
The biggest crowds I had ever seen were at Epsom on Derby Day, between
Mortlake and Putney on Boat-race Day, and in St. Peter's Square at Rome
on the election-day of Leo XIII.: but this great _congeries_ at
Scarborough surpassed them all in impressiveness. I {72} turned my
back on the "set pieces" and Roman candles, gazed almost awestruck at
the vast sea of upturned white faces on the beach below, lit up from
time to time by the lurid glow of coloured fires, and listened to the
cry "Ah-h-h!" of the great multitude as the rockets shrilled up into
the starlit sky. _Mirabile visu et auditu!_ it somehow made me think
(at Scarborough on Bank Holiday evening!) of the Last Day and the
Valley of Jehoshaphat. From Scarborough, before going north to
Scotland, I went for a few days to Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert
Jerningham's beautiful place near Berwick, with views on every side
over the rolling Border country. "Norham's castle steep," built nine
centuries before by Flambard, the "Magnificent" Bishop of Durham, was
on the Longridge property; and I spent some delightful hours there with
my accomplished host, who was a charming companion, and (as became a
_bachelier-es-lettres_ of Paris University) could tell a good story as
well in French as he could in English. He showed me among many
curiosities a letter from an early Quaker which I thought worth
copying:--
FRIEND JOHN,--
I desire thee to be so kind as to go to one of those sinful men in the
flesh called an attorney, and let him take out an instrument, with a
seal fixed thereto, by means whereof we may seize the outward
tabernacle of George Green, and bring him before the lambskin men at
Westminster, and teach him to do as he would be done by; and so I rest
thy friend in the light,
M.D.
Mountstuart claimed me for a short visit when I had got across the
Border; and I found the big house very cheerful under the new and
youthful regime, and my hostess, now a happy mother, driving the baby
Lady Mary about the island and exhibiting {73} her to the admiring
farmers' wives. I made my way up the West coast to Fort Augustus to
spend the rest of the Oxford "Long," travelling thence in September to
Aberdeen to read a paper at the annual conference of the Catholic Truth
Society. There was a large attendance, Lady Lovat doing hostess at a
big reception one evening; and it was pleasant to find oneself in a
genuinely Scottish, as well as Catholic, gathering, presided over by a
Highland bishop (AEneas Chisholm of beloved memory), as patriotic and
popular as he was pious and pleasant. My paper, on "The Holy See and
the Scottish Universities," was very well received, and the local
newspapers did me the honour of reprinting it verbatim next morning,
while the _Scotsman_ devoted a leading article to it. Our principal
meeting, in the largest hall of the city, wound up not only with "Faith
of our Fathers" but "God save the King." "Is this necessary?"
whispered a prelate of Nationalist leanings to the presiding bishop, in
the middle of the loyal anthem. "It may not be necessary," replied
Bishop Chisholm, in a very audible "aside," "but it is very right and
extremely proper." _O si sic omnes!_"[19]
[1] Such seeming exceptions as the noble churches of St. John at
Norwich and St. Philip at Arundel, the Duke of Newcastle's sumptuous
chapel at Clumber, the impressive church of the Irvingites in Gordon
Square, are only satisfactory in so far as they are more or less exact
imitations of mediaeval Gothic. The cloisters of Fort Augustus Abbey
are beautiful because they are reproductions, from A. W. Pugin's
note-books, of real live fifteenth-century tracery. The more the
modern Gothic architect strives to be original (a hard saying, but a
true one), the more certainly he fails. And to see how feebly
ineffective even his imitations can be, one need only look at the
entrance tower of St. Swithun's Quad at Magdalen, and compare it with
the incomparable Founder's Tower immediately opposite.
Let me add that I have no animus against Downside in particular: it is
merely an instance taken at random to illustrate my thesis. I had felt
just the same, years before, about the first grandiose plans for our
own church at Fort Augustus. "Go to Westminster Abbey--you can see it
from your windows," I wrote to the architect, "and get an inspiration
from that glorious temple of _living_ Gothic. Your elaborate designs
have no life, no reality. If they were ever realized among our
Highland hills, I should expect some genie of the Arabian Nights to
swoop down one day and whisk the whole impossible structure back to
Victoria Street!" I still recall the pleasure and approval with which
Dom Gilbert Dolan of Downside, one of the most distinguished of modern
Benedictine architects, read this letter.
[2] Who was the reporter who once announced (I believe it was really a
printer's error and not a little bit of malice) that "the Conservatives
among the audience received the candidate with welcoming snouts"?
[3] Arthur Balfour had resigned the premiership in the previous week,
and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had succeeded him.
[4] Not an easy task! for Lovat wanted the Scouts to have all the
honour, which _they_ wished assigned to him. My inscription (I believe
generally approved) ran: Erected by the Lovat Tenantry and Feuars of
the Aird and Fort Augustus Districts to Commemorate the Raising of the
Lovat Scouts for Service in South Africa by Simon Joseph, 16th Lord
Lovat, C.V.O., C.B., D.S.O., who Desired to Show that the Martial
Spirit of their Ancestors still Animates the Highlanders of To-Day, and
Whose Confidence was Justified by the Success in the Field of the
Gallant Corps Whose Existence was Due to His Loyalty and Patriotism.
A.D. 1905.
[5] "A woman speaking in public is like a dog walking on its hind legs:
it is not well done, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
[6] My native county remained consistently and uninterruptedly Tory for
fifty years--from 1868, when it returned Lord Garlics, until 1918, when
its separate representation was taken from it by the new Redistribution
Act.
[7] Sir Charles had sat in Parliament continuously, except for a few
weeks, since 1868, when he was first elected for Buteshire. It was
only this very slight break which prevented him from being at one time
the Father of the House of Commons.
[8] I heard an odd story to the effect that at the Anglican Church at
Monte Carlo no one had ever heard any hymn before No. 37 announced to
be sung; the reason being that the mention of any one from 1 to 36
would instantly have sent a quota of the congregation racing down to
stake their money on that number! It was, and is, a current
superstition that a number suggested by something as remote as possible
from gambling is likely to prove a lucky one.
[9] Due, I think, largely to the fact that though the greater part of
the church is ninth and tenth century work, it has the air of being
very much older, and seems to recall the days of St. Ambrose himself.
[10] "Kelburn" was, I believe, the old spelling. About the same time
the Duke of Athole dropped _his_ final _e_ also; and the name-board at
the well-known station, at his castle gates, displayed, as I observed
on my next journey to the Highlands, the legend "Blair Atholl," instead
of "Blair Athole" as formerly.
[11] Augustine Birrell, the distinguished essayist, whose literary
method, easy, witty, and urbane, has evoked the word "birrelling." He
succeeded Mr. Bryce a little later as Irish Secretary, and retained
that office (in which he was no more successful than most of his
predecessors) under Mr. Asquith.
[12] _Nee_ Legge: one of a crowd of sisters (Ladies Louisa, Octavia,
Wilhelmina, Barbara, Charlotte, and I know not how many more) with whom
I made friends as a small boy when staying with my parents at
Aix-la-Chapelle; and we saw much of them afterwards. We children used
to call them the "Lady-legs." Their brother Augustus, who was also a
friend of my childhood, became Bishop of Lichfield in 1891.
[13] Built in James II.'s reign (the original castle was of Henry
VII.'s), when the accession of a Catholic King enabled Catholics,
British and Irish, to emerge for a short time from the Catacombs.
[14] Lord Gormanston, like Lord Talbot de Malahide and a few others,
represented the Anglo-Irish landowners of the time of Henry VII., "Lord
of Ireland." My friend Lord Kenmare was typical of the enriched
Elizabethan settlers in the country, while Sir Henry Bellingham was one
of the seventeenth-century group of immigrants popularly known as
"Cromwell's Drummers." Three out of the four mentioned were Catholics.
[15] The first baronet and Baron de Saumarez was second in command at
the Battle of the Nile, and was raised to the peerage by William IV.
[16] It was the parish minister of Millport, in Cumbrae (off the coast
of Ayrshire) who habitually prayed at Divine Service for the
"inhabitants of the Greater and the Lesser Cumbraes, and the adjacent
islands of Great Britain and Ireland!"
[17] The late Mr. Choate. "When I came into this assembly this
evening, I felt very much like the prophet Daniel when he got into the
lion's den. When Daniel looked around, and saw the company in which he
was, 'Well,' he said, '_whoever's got to do the after-dinner speaking,
it won't be me!_'"
[18] A turbot's mouth is twisted on one side, rather as if it had
belonged to a round fish which some one had accidentally trodden on,
and had squashed half-flat.
[19] My friend Lord Ralph Kerr had, some time previously, refused to
preside at a meeting of the same Society (of which he was president) in
another Scottish city, on learning that the local committee would not
permit the National Anthem to be sung at the close. The reason
alleged, that "the Irish in the audience would not stand it," did not,
naturally, strike the gallant Scottish general as an adequate one.
{74}
CHAPTER V
1906-1907
Before returning to Oxford for the autumn term of 1906, I spent a
pleasant ten days at Abbotsford with my old friends the Lane Foxes, and
visited with them Dryburgh Abbey, Galashiels, and other interesting
places. Melrose, too, we thoroughly explored, agreeing that (_pace_
Sir Walter) the time for seeing it "aright" was _not_ "by the pale
moonlight," but on a sunlit afternoon, which alone does justice to the
marvellous colouring--grey shot with rose and yellow--of the old stone.
Modern textbooks talk of the "decadence" of its architecture, but it
has details of surpassing beauty nevertheless. It was ill exchanging
the beauties of Tweedside in perfect September weather for foggy
London. I arrived there on a Sunday morning, just in time for high
mass at Westminster Cathedral, of which a fog rather enhances the
charm, softening the raw brick walls and imparting a mysterious and
shadowy splendour to the great spaces under the lofty domes. The grave
polyphonic music, perfectly rendered, greatly pleased me; but the
acoustics of the building seemed to be defective.[1] A noted preacher
was discoursing {75} to an immense congregation on "Pessimism"--so the
notice-boards informed me; but it might as well have been on Optimism
for anything I could hear of it. Walking homewards to Regent's Park, I
looked in at a Ritualistic church in Red Lion Square, where a singular
function was in progress in presence of the (schismatic) Archbishop of
Sinai, under the auspices of a body styling itself "The Anglican and
Orthodox Churches Union."[2] As I entered, a clergyman was just
remarking from the pulpit that as there was no visible Church on earth,
or as, at any rate, it was temporally broken to bits, there was no use
in looking for a visible head! a theory which his audience may or may
not have found satisfactory.[3]
I lingered for a day at Birmingham, on my way to Oxford, to attend the
opening of the nave of the Newman Memorial Church. It was the
sixty-first anniversary of Newman's reception into the Church at
Littlemore, as well as the sixth of the death of Lord Bute, whose
conversion was a fruit of the Oxford movement, of which Newman was the
inspiring genius. I was pleased with the simplicity, even austerity,
of the building, relieved to some extent by the beautiful tints of the
double row of marble monoliths, and by the warm russet of the coved
roof of Spanish chestnut. Eight or ten prelates (the Archbishop of
Westminster was the preacher) gave dignity to the function, which {76}
was followed by a rather higgledy-piggledy luncheon at the "Plough and
Harrow" next door. The Norfolk family were of course present in force
at their beloved Oratory, the Duke, with sisters, brothers-in-law,
nephews and nieces, being prominent among the large gathering. Lord
Ralph Kerr's boy, a pupil of the Fathers, showed me over the school;
and I rather marvelled to see an educational establishment of such
deserved repute housed in so quaint a collection of lean-to's and
shanties, the only thing worth looking at being the fine refectory of
the Oratory, which the schoolboys used as their dining-room.
I found Oxford swept and garnished for the new term, and my old friend
the President of Magdalen installed as Vice-chancellor, and performing
his multifarious duties (which included the matriculation of my two
Benedictine freshmen) with the mingled dignity and urbanity which
characterized him. Grissell, who was in residence this term, invited
me to luncheon to meet "a Roman Prince," and a lady who had, he said,
been miraculously cured by the Madonna of Pompeii. The cure,
unfortunately, had been incomplete or temporary, for the lady had had a
relapse, was in bed, and could not turn up. The Roman Prince, or
princeling, proved to be Don Andrea Buoncompagni-Ludovisi, descendant
of two Popes,[4] and a freshman at Merton; a pleasant youth, {77} but
his English, though fluent, was vulgar rather than princely. I
wondered where he had picked it up. A different type of Italian whom I
met the same week was the distinguished South Italian violinist, Signor
Simonetti. He had been fiddling at our Musical Club on the previous
evening--_roba Napolitana_, but clever and interesting. Our
conversation, however, turned not on music but on the "Evil Eye," as I
was anxious to know to what extent the belief in this still prevailed
in Italy. He said it was as persistent as ever, especially in the
south, and told us how the most famous advocate in Naples, in quite
recent times, was so universally accredited with this mysterious power,
that when the leader opposed to him in an impending lawsuit died on the
eve of the case coming on, another lawyer was only with the greatest
difficulty found to take his place. _He_ was killed by an accident on
the very morning of the trial; and the dreaded advocate was face to
face with the judge, who was in fear and trembling, as he expected to
have to give judgment against him. The story went that when the judge
rose to speak, his spectacles accidentally fell out of place. "I am
struck blind!" he cried out; "forgive me, Signor Avvocato--I have not
yet pronounced against you." Suddenly his spectacles fell across his
nose again. "Forgive me again," he said; "I can see after all!" The
Neapolitans laughed, but they believed all the same. When this
redoubtable advocate fell ill, half Naples was praying fervently for
his death; and if one reproached them for desiring the death of a
fellowman, the answer was, "Non e un uomo, e un _jettatore_!" Signor
Simonetti, I felt pretty sure, himself {78} sympathized with this
sentiment, although he passed it off as a joke. I contributed a tale
of a certain Count who had been pointed out to me, during my visit to
Naples in the previous year, as the most dreaded _jettatore_ in the
city. He was dining alone at a restaurant, and I was told that no one,
if they could avoid it, would sit down in his company. Meeting his
cousin, the old Duca di M----, in the street, he gave him his arm. The
Duca suddenly slipped, fell, and broke his leg. He was stunned by the
shock; and his first words, on recovering consciousness, were whispered
(in confidential Neapolitan patois) into the ear of his formidable
kinsman: "Grazie, perche tu me putive accidere, e te si cuntentate de
m'arruinare!" ("Thanks; for you might have killed me, and you contented
yourself with laming me!")[5]
Some of us went over to Radley College for the usual All Saints' play,
the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, in Greek; and it _was_ Greek, no doubt, to
the majority of the audience. Books of the words in English were,
however, supplied--"an attention," remarked a local paper, "which the
ladies received with unconcealed satisfaction, and the gentlemen with
satisfaction which they vainly endeavoured to conceal." Some of the
undergraduates present doubtless, like the schoolboy in _Vice Versa_,
"recognized several words from the Greek Grammar"; but what pleased me
was an elderly clergyman who declined to share his wife's copy of the
translation. "No, no, my {79} dear," he said, "I can follow the Greek
quite sufficiently well!" but before the end of the first act they were
both very contentedly looking over the English version together.
Michaelmas Term is not of course the time for triumphs in the Schools;
but we were all delighted with the final achievement of the invincible
Cyril Martindale, S.J., who this autumn crowned his previous
successes--first classes in Moderations and "Greats," the Hertford and
Craven Scholarships, and the Chancellor's and Gaisford Prizes for Latin
and Greek Verse--by carrying off the Derby Scholarship for the year.
Another Jesuit much in evidence at Oxford at this time was Bernard
Vaughan, who was preaching sermons, giving lectures, and attending
discussions and debates with characteristic energy. Colum Stuart and I
heard him deliver himself, at a full-dress meeting of the Union, on the
subject of Egotism. His perfervid oratory made one occasionally
_squirm_ (it is the only word); but he was very well received by his
young audience, and carried the House with him.
To the Jesuits and Benedictines, already domiciled in Oxford, were
added this winter the Franciscan Capuchins, who opened with some
ceremony their church and "seraphic college"[6] at Cowley. It was
something of an historic event, this returning of the Friars to Oxford
after a rustication of 367 years; and it evoked general and kindly
interest {80} quite outside Catholic circles. Sir Hubert Jerningham
accompanied me to the inaugural function, and to dinner later at Mgr.
Kennard's. We spoke of the decay of the good old custom, universal in
my youth, of grace before meals. Our host recalled a country squire
who, perfunctorily looking round his table, would mutter, "No parson?
Thank God!"[7] and hastily seat himself. I told of a Scots farmer on a
Caledonian Canal steam-boat, who, invited to "return thanks," delivered
himself of this sentiment, "O Lord, we're all floating down the stream
of time to the ocean of eternity, for Christ's sake, Amen!" and Sir
Hubert had a family story of the chaplain who, if he espied
champagne-glasses on the table, would begin his grace with "Bountiful
Jehovah!" but if only sherry-glasses, "We are not worthy of the least
of these Thy mercies." We all remembered Mr. Mallock's canon, who,
glancing with clasped hands at the _menu_, beginning with two soups,
comprising three _entrees_, and ending with Strasburg pate, began, "O
Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, whose glory is so exceeding
that even they veil their faces before Thee; consecrate to their
appointed use these poor morsels before us, and make them humble
instruments in the great scheme of our sanctification." I took Sir
Hubert next day over the Clarendon Press, which I had never myself
seen. We were both struck by two things: all the machinery was
American, and there was no electric light, the whole place being lit by
flaring {81} gas-jets.[8] We had planned that evening to go and hear
George Wyndham speak at the Union; but it occurred to us, as a happy
thought, to stay comfortably at home on a foggy November night, and
read his speech in next day's _Times_. The only important politician I
heard speak this term was Bonar Law, by whom I sat at the Conservative
Club dinner one evening. I found him a very pleasant neighbour, and he
made as good a speech as I ever heard at a gathering of the kind.
I made my way northward to Beaufort for Christmas, feeling a bit of a
wreck after a sharp bout of influenza, and enjoyed to the full the
breezy sunshine which so often prevails there in mid-winter. There was
a shooting-party at New Year, with pleasant _al fresco_ luncheons in
sheltered corners of leafless woods, and of an evening music, and ghost
stories round a great fire of beechen logs. Of telepathy between the
dying and the living Lord Hamilton gave me a striking instance. He had
served in South Africa; and at dawn, sleeping on the veldt, was aroused
by an unmistakable voice thrice calling his name. The voice was his
father's, of whose death he heard next day by cable. The quiet
conviction with which he narrated this little incident impressed me
much.
Staying at an uncle's in Edinburgh on my way south, I met at dinner
Lord Dunedin and some other interesting people; and there was some
"good {82} talk" on books and poetry. Some one quoted Swinburne's
opinion that the two finest lines in the language[9] were Browning's--
"As the king-bird, with ages on his plumes,
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms."
Three unhackneyed images, from the _City of the Soul_, I noted as
admirable:
"The distant rook's faint cawing, harsh and sweet."
"Black was his hair, as hyacinths by night."
"Wet green eyes, like a full chalk stream."
The mention of Mallock reminded me of some of his delectable similes:
"Miss Drake dropped a short curtsey, which resembled the collapse of a
concertina."
"Above them a seagull passed, like the drifting petals of a magnolia."
"She advanced slowly towards the group, moving along the carpet like a
clockwork mouse on wheels."
"Her eyes had the brown moisture that glimmers on a slug's back."
A cousin of mine at this dinner, lately returned from China, amused me
by the information that the pigeon-English word, or phrase, for a
bishop was "Number one topside heaven pidgin-man!"
On the evening of my arrival in London, a geographical friend carried
me to a notable meeting of his Society at Queen's Hall--the sailor Duke
of the Abruzzi lecturing, in quaint staccato {83} Italian-English, on
his ascent of Ruanzori, in Equatorial Africa. The King (with the
Prince of Wales) was on the platform--stout, grey-bearded, and rather
bored, I fancied, at being deprived of his after-dinner cigar: he made
a nice little speech of thanks and appreciation. A day or two later
came the startling news of the great earthquake in Jamaica, the only
Englishman who lost his life being my dear old friend Sir James
Fergusson, whose body was found beneath the ruins of a tobacconist's
shop in Kingston. He was a man of many gifts and many friends, who had
served his country with distinction in almost every part of the Empire;
and his death was a real tragedy, as well as a very real grief to me.
It was followed very shortly by that of another old friend, Susan Lady
Sherborne; and two very pleasant houses in Cornwall Gardens and Brook
Street, where I had spent many happy hours, were thus closed to me.
There was some talk, a little later, of a memorial to Sir James, the
Anglican Bishop of the West Indies suggesting that this should take the
form of subscriptions to his church restoration scheme. I ventured
strongly to deprecate this proposal in the columns of _The Times_, and
my objections were emphatically endorsed by Mr. Fleming, the well-known
Presbyterian minister in Belgravia.[10]
Two more deaths I may note in the early spring of 1907--the first that
of Professor Pelham, president {84} of Trinity; a gentleman and a
scholar, a real loss to Oxford, and (incidentally) one of my kindest
friends among college heads, just as his brother Sidney (famous slow
bowler and future archdeacon) had been thirty years before, when I was
a feather-headed freshman at Magdalen. In the same week died our
worthy Chancellor, Lord Goschen, after little more than three years of
office. Lords Rosebery and Curzon of Kedleston emerged as the
favourites among the many candidates "in the air"; but dining with a
large party at Lord Teignmouth's a little later, I heard it confidently
said that the country parsons would almost certainly "bring Curzon in."
They came up, as a matter of fact, in such swarms that they practically
swamped the election, Lord Curzon obtaining 1,101 votes against Lord
Rosebery's 440. I sat, by the way, at Lord Teignmouth's dinner next an
American "scientist" (odious word!) of some kind, who told me some odd
things about the Lower Mississippi. That river, he said, had, in 176
years, shortened itself by 242 miles--an average of about l 1/10 miles
per year. From this it followed that in the old Oolitic-Silurian
period, some 100,000 years ago, the lower Mississippi was upwards of
1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a
fishing-rod!
I went to Downside in March, for the solemn blessing of the new abbot,
my kind and learned friend Dom Cuthbert Butler. The elaborate ceremony
took nearly three hours: we were mercifully spared a sermon, but, _en
revanche_, the episcopal and abbatial speeches at the subsequent
luncheon were long and rather wearisome. At Fort Augustus, {85}
whatever the occasion, we never in those days derogated from the good
old monastic usage of silence, and public reading, in the refectory.
_Summum ibi fiat silentium_, said Saint Benedict: "let no _mussitatio_
[delicious Low Latin word for "whispering"] be heard there, or any
voice save that of the reader alone." The custom was one, I think, as
congenial to our guests as to their monastic hosts.
I was preoccupied at this time with the rapidly-failing health of my
oldest Oxford friend, H. D. Grissell of Brasenose, who spent half his
year in Rome, and the other half in what seemed a bit of old Rome
transported to Oxford. He was the most pertinacious and indefatigable
_collector_ I ever knew: coins, books and bindings, brass-rubbings,
autographs, book-plates, holy relics, postage-stamps, even birds'
eggs--all was fish that came to his far-flung net; and he laboured
incessantly to make all his collections, as far as possible, complete.
I found the old man at this time, rather pathetically, trying to
complete the collection of eggshells which he had begun as a Harrow boy
sixty years before. He insisted on exhibiting every drawer of his
cabinet, and was greatly pleased with the motto which, I told him, Sir
Walter Trevelyan had inscribed on _his_ egg-cabinet: "Hic Argus esto,
non Briareus"; or, in plain English, "Look, but don't touch!"[11]
Grissell said he would like to affix this classical caution to all his
collections of curios; but he did not live to do this, or indeed to do
much else of {86} any kind. He left England before Easter for Rome;
and there (as perhaps he would have wished) he died very suddenly a few
weeks later. By his own desire his body was brought back to England,
at great trouble and cost (these _post mortem_ migrations never
appealed to me), and was laid near his parents' graves in the pretty
country churchyard of Mickleham, in Surrey. There was a large
gathering in the pouring rain, Professor Robinson Ellis and I
representing his many Oxford friends. As his literary executor, I came
into possession of a great number of curious and interesting letters
and documents, dealing chiefly with Roman matters and the early days of
the Ritual movement at Oxford and elsewhere.
The Corpus Professor of Latin, old Robinson Ellis, and I saw
subsequently (perhaps drawn together by the loss of our common friend)
a good deal of one another. At "meat tea," a meal he dearly loved, we
used to sit long together, and talk classics, the only subject in which
he seemed in the least interested. I wish I had noted down all the odd
bits of erudition with which he used to entertain me. Cicero's last
words, he said (I cannot imagine on what authority) were "Causa
causarum, miserere mei!"[12] A curious story (perhaps mediaeval) of
Ovid was of how two monks visited his tomb, and in gratitude for the
noble line--the best, in his own opinion, that he had ever
written--"Virtus est licitis abstinuisse bonis," began reciting Paters
and Aves for his soul. The poet's spirit, unhappily, {87} was
unappreciative of their charity; and a voice was heard from the tomb
declaiming the irreverent pentameter: "Nolo Paternoster: carpe, viator,
iter!" The professor told me that in his opinion the best elegiac
couplet ever written in English was:
"Three Patagonian apes with their arms extended akimbo:
Three on a rock were they--seedy, but happy withal."
He said that one of Dr. Johnson's acutest literary criticisms was his
remark that Tacitus seemed rather to have made notes for a historical
work than to have written a history. The word "jour," he pointed out
to me, was derived from "dies" (though every single letter was
different) through the Italian--"dies, diurnus, giorno, jour." He
asked if I could tell him the authorship of the striking couplet--
"Mors mortis! morti mortem nisi morte dedisses,
AEternae vitae janua clausa foret."
This I was unable to do: on the other hand, I evoked a chuckle
(whimsical etymologies always pleased him) by telling him how a
fifteenth-century writer[13] had rendered the "Royal Collegiate Church
of Windsor" into Latin as "Collegium Domini Regis de _Ventomorbido_!"
At the end of Lent Term I spent a few days at Eastbourne, which struck
me (as the Honourable Mrs. Skewton struck Mr. Dombey) as being
"perfectly genteel"--no shops on the front, no minstrels or pierrots or
cockshys or vulgarity. The hill behind seemed to swarm with schools:
my host took me to one where he had two sons--a fine {88} situation,
capital playgrounds, and the head a pleasant capable-seeming little
man, who trotted briskly about on his little Chippendale legs, clad in
knickerbockers, and was as keen on his Aberdeen terriers as on his
young pupils. I remember at Eastbourne a quite appallingly ugly Town
Hall, and a surprisingly beautiful fourteenth-century church, I suppose
the only bit of old Eastbourne left. I went on to Arundel for my usual
pleasant Easter-tide visit; and after hearing much florid church-music
there, I enjoyed, on Low Sunday, the well-rendered plain-chant at
Westminster Cathedral; but I did not enjoy a terrible motett composed
by an eminent Jew--the words unintelligible and the music frankly
pagan. My nephew Kelburn and his wife ran me down one day to Chatham
in their new motor--cream-colour lined with crimson, very smart indeed.
He had been lately posted as first lieutenant to H.M.S. _Cochrane_, and
took us all over the great grey monster, vastly interesting. We buzzed
home through Cobham and Rochester, stopping to look over the grand old
Norman cathedral. "How strange," observed the simple sailor, looking
at the sculptured images round the west doorway, "to see all these old
Roman Catholic saints in a Protestant cathedral!" How I wished some of
my young Oxford friends had been by to hear him! Our whole drive to
town was of course redolent of Dickens and "Pickwick"--to me, but not
to my modern nephew and niece.
For the last week of the vacation a friend was bent on taking me to
Belgium; but great guns were blowing when we reached the coast, so we
alighted at Dover and stayed there! finding it quite {89} an
interesting place of sojourn. I was astonished at the antiquity,
extent, and interest of the Castle, especially of its church, once a
Roman barrack, and its tower, the ancient Pharos or lighthouse.
Gilbert Scott and the Royal Engineers between them had done their best
(or their worst) in the way of "restoration," disjoining the Pharos
from the main building, and adding an Early English (!) front, windows,
and door; but it still was, and is, by far the oldest edifice in
England used for religious worship, and of the greatest antiquarian
interest.
The event of the summer at Oxford was the installation of our new
Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who was by no means content, like the Duke of
Wellington, Lord Salisbury, and others of his not indistinguished
predecessors, to be quietly inducted into office by the university
officials at his own country residence. There was a great function at
the Sheldonian, and a Latin harangue from my lord which was both
elegant and well delivered, though it was thought by some that his
emotional reference to his late wife was a little out of place.
Oxford had caught the pageant-fever which was this summer devastating
England; and a great part of the term was spent (some cynics said
wasted) in the extensive preparations for our own particular show.
When they were all but complete, one of the historic "rags" by which
Christ Church has from time to time distinguished itself broke out, in
consequence of the House becoming head of the river; and among other
excesses, some damage was done to the pageant-stands already erected in
the meadows. A few days after this _emeute_ a description of it, which
is really too good to be lost, {90} appeared in the _Corriere della
Sera_ of Milan, "telephoned by our London correspondent." I translate
literally from the Italian:--
Recently the students of Oxford were beaten by those of Cambridge in
the great annual regatta: the other day they were defeated by the
sportive group (_il gruppo sportivo_) of Merton College; finally, they
allowed themselves to be vanquished by the sportive section (_la
sezione sportiva_) of the Society of Christ Church, to whom was
adjudged the primacy of the Thames. Yesterday, profoundly moved in
their _amore proprio_, the students of Oxford permitted themselves to
proceed to deplorable excesses, even to the point of applying fire to
the _stands_ erected on the riverside by the rival Societies. They set
fire also to the tent of the Secretariat of Christ Church, feeding the
flames with the chairs which they discovered in the vicinity.[14]
I believe that our Oxford pageant (in spite of the wet summer) proved
financially successful, if not altogether so artistically. A few of
the scenes were very pretty, especially the earliest (St. Frideswide),
and also the one representing Charles I. and his family at Oxford. And
the ecclesiastical and monastic episodes were instructive, if only as
showing the incompetence of twentieth-century Anglicanism to reproduce
even the externals--much more the spirit--of the Catholicism of old
England. Even more deplorable was the "comic" scene (written by the
Chichele professor of modern history!) in which the _clarum et
venerabile nomen_ of one of Oxford's saintliest sons was dragged in the
mud: Roger Racon being depicted as a mountebank cheap-jack, hawking
quack medicines from a {91} motor-bicycle![15] My brother, who had
entertained me at Warwick, came as my guest to witness the Oxford
effort; and we had the rather interesting experience of viewing it in
the company of Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. They were both pleased
and interested; but it was impossible to deny that the poetic glamour
of the Warwick pageant (largely due to the romantic beauty of its
setting) was almost wholly wanting at Oxford.
Of the other pageants which were sprouting up all over the country
during this summer (unhappily one of the wettest on record), I attended
only one--that held at Bury St. Edmunds, which attracted me as being
mainly concerned with Benedictines. The setting was almost as fine as
at Warwick--verdant lawns, big trees and the majestic ruins of our
famous abbey all "in the picture"; and the "monks," mostly represented
by blameless curates, were at least presentable, not unkempt
ragamuffins as at Oxford.[16] The appearance of "Abbot Sampson"
(played, I was told, by a local archdeacon) was grotesque enough: he
wore throughout a purple chasuble over a black cassock, with a white
mitre, and strode about brandishing a great wooden crosier! but he
spoke his lines very well. Everything, however, was spoilt by the
pitiless rain, which {92} fell unceasingly. A clever black-haired lady
who played Boadicea (I believe the wife of an Ipswich dentist) had to
abandon her chariot and horses and appear on foot, splashing through
several inches of mud; and some of the "early British" matrons and
maidens sported umbrellas and mackintoshes! I had to leave half-way
through the performance, chilled to the bone, and firmly convinced that
open-air drama in England was a snare and a delusion.
Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned above, was one of the miscellaneous
celebrities, including Prince Arthur of Connaught and "General" Booth,
whom our Chancellor nominated for honorary degrees at his first
Encaenia. I met Mrs. Whitelaw Reid (the American Ambassadress) at
dinner at Magdalen on Commemoration evening, and lunched with her a few
days later at Dorchester House. One of the attaches was told off to
show me the famous "old Masters," about which I found he knew a good
deal less than I did! The same agreeable young American accompanied me
a little later to Bradfield, to see the boys play _Antigone_: a real
summer's day, for once, and the performance was admirable, especially
that of the title-role, the youth who played the part proving himself a
genuine tragedian. The comments of a lady just behind us, who was
profoundly bored most of the time, were amusingly fatuous.[17]
{93}
I was in spiritual charge this term of our Catholic undergraduates
(fifty or so), their chaplain having gone off on an invalid's holiday,
and left his flock in my care. I was delighted to have the company
every week-end of Robert Hugh Benson, who was giving the Sunday
conferences in our chapel. "Far from being the snake-like gloomy type
of priest so common in fiction," a weekly paper said of him about this
time, "Father Benson is a thorough man of the world, liberal, amiable,
and vivacious." He was, of course, all this and a great deal more; and
I greatly appreciated the opportunity which these summer weeks afforded
me of becoming really intimate with him. It was the beginning of a
genuine friendship, which was only interrupted (not, please God,
broken) by his premature and lamented death seven years later.[18]
[1] "Very satisfactory, I think, from an architectural point of view,"
said the alderman to his colleague, as they surveyed together the
interior of the new town hall; "but I fear the acoustics are not
exactly what they ought to be." His companion sniffed several times.
"Do you think not?" he said. "I don't notice anything myself!"
[2] [Greek: Henosis tes anglichanes chai tes Orthodoxou Echchlesias.]
[3] It was at least a convenient method of disposing of the Pope and
his claims.
[4] Collaterally, of course: Gregory XIII. (Buoncompagni), 1572-1585;
and Gregory XV. (Ludovisi), 1621-1623. I interested Don Andrea by
telling him that Gregory XIII. (reformer of the Julian Calendar and
builder of the Quirinal) was probably the last Pope officially prayed
for at Oxford, and that in his own college chapel. Mass certainly
continued to be celebrated in Merton Chapel well into the Pontificate
of Gregory XIII.
[5] The possession of the Evil Eye has never been considered
incompatible with the highest moral excellence. Pius IX., who was
venerated by his people as a saint, was nevertheless regarded by many
of them as an undoubted _jettatore_.
[6] The traditional name given by the Franciscans to their monastic
schools. But they had, if I remember rightly, sufficient sense of
humour not to apply it to their Cowley seminary.
[7] Nearly, but not quite, the shortest grace on record. That palm,
perhaps, belongs to the north country farmer wiping his mouth with the
back of his hand after a plentiful meal, and ejaculating the single
word, "Then!"
[8] Perhaps for the same reason as was given me by a Christ Church don,
who rashly prophesied that Wolsey's great hall would never be lighted
by electricity, as the additional heat given by the gas-jets was
absolutely essential by way of supplement to the huge fireplaces.
[9] A large assumption; but Swinburne was doubtless better qualified
than most people to make it. The lines are from _Sordello_ (ed. 1863,
p. 464).
[10] My own idea, suggested by a proposed memorial to Goschen at Rugby
school, where James Fergusson had been his school-fellow, was that the
memory of the latter also should be perpetuated there in some fitting
manner. I received letters cordially approving this suggestion; but I
never heard whether it was carried out in the case of either, or both,
of these distinguished public servants.
[11] Is it necessary to explain that Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing
guardian of Io, had a hundred eyes, and Briareus, the pugnacious son of
Earth and Heaven, a hundred arms? Sir Walter's application of these
myths was distinctly neat.
[12] Authentic or not, I added them to the collection of _novissima
verba_ of famous men which I had been long compiling. See Appendix.
[13] Clement Maydeston, in his _Directorii Defensorium_ (A.D. 1495).
"Windsor," of course, means the "winding shore," not the "sick wind!"
[14] The truth underlying the last sentence of this delectable report
is that some of the wilder rioters chucked the Secretary of the
Pageant's desk (containing all his papers) into the Cherwell; but it
was rescued so speedily by two of their more sober comrades that no
harm was done.
[15] This particular episode was really regarded by many people as
almost an outrage; and an article called "A Blot on the Pageant," which
I devoted to it in a weekly review, elicited many expressions of
sympathy and approval in Oxford and elsewhere.
[16] The Master of the Oxford Pageant, to whom I protested emphatically
against the scandalous caricatures of the Benedictines of Abingdon,
calmly told me that the British public looked on a monk as a comic kind
of creature, and would think itself defrauded unless he were so
represented!
[17] The lines (vv. 824-826):
[Greek: echousa ... tan phrygian xenan
tan, chissos os atenes,
petraia blasta davasen]
seemed to strike the good lady particularly--the sound, that is, not
the sense of them. "Kisson----blast her--d--n her! Dear me!" she
remarked; "what language, to be sure! I had no idea that Antigone
[pronounced _Antigoan_] was that kind of young person!"
[18] The Rev. R. H. Benson died on October 19, 1914.
{94}
CHAPTER VI
1907-1908
The opening of the Long Vacation of 1907 was pleasantly signalized for
us Benedictines by the gratifying successes in the Final Schools of our
little Hall, which secured two first classes (in "Greats" and History),
and a second class in Theology. The _Oxford Magazine_ was kind enough
to point out that this was a remarkable achievement for a Hall
numbering nine undergraduates, and compared favourably with the
percentage of honours at any college in the university. I was given to
understand that my young theologian would also have secured his "first"
had he not objected to the matter and form of some of the questions set
him, and declined to answer them!
This cheerful news sent me in good spirits up to Dumfries for my usual
week's examinations at the Benedictine convent school there. I found
almost eighty nuns in residence, including the exiled community of the
mother house of Arras, whom (the Prioress was eighty-five, and there
were several old ladies on crutches) the great French Republic had
driven out of house and home as a "danger to the State!" I had several
interesting talks with "Madame la Prieure," who had been professed in
the reign of Louis Philippe, and who bore her cruel {95} uprootal with
true French (and Christian) resignation and cheerfulness. I do not
know if the tradition about St. Swithun holds good in Scotland; but
these days succeeding his festival (July 15) were certainly almost
continuously wet. One of the French nuns said that in her country
(Picardy) St. Medard was credited with a similar influence, and quoted
the lines--
Quan ploon per San Medar,
Ploon quarante jhiours pus tard;
and I recalled the Italian distich about St. Bibiana (December 2)--
Se piove il giorno di Santa Bibiana,
Piovera per quaranta giorni ed una settimana.
I spent a few days at Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's Border
castle, when my work at Dumfries was finished, and found my host, as
usual, excellent company, and full of anecdotes, both French and
English. Speaking of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund at
Pontigny in which he had joined some years before, he said that an
English newspaper described an open-air benediction given by the
"Bishops of Estrade and Monte"; the reporters having doubtless been
informed that the bishops would _mount_ on the _platform_ to give the
blessing! He showed us a cutting from another English newspaper,
stating that MM. Navire, Chavire, and Bourrasque had been shipwrecked
and drowned at sea! Sir Hubert had a complete set of the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_ in his library; and I hunted up for his delectation a
passage in which M. Forgues, writing on English clerical life, _a
propos_ of George Eliot's first book, {96} gave an original etymology
for the word _tract_. "Il [Rev. Amos Barton] a sa _Track Society_, qui
va mettre en Fair toutes les bonnes femmes du pays, enregimentees pour
depister (track) les pauvres heres susceptibles de conversion." The
same writer rendered the epithet "Gallio-like" (applied by the minister
to the parishioners of Shepperton) by "pareils a des Francais!"
Yorkshire, after Northumberland, claimed me for two pleasant
visits--the first to the Herries' at Everingham, with its beautiful
chapel copied from the Maison Carree at Nimes, and its famous
deer-park, one of the oldest in England (so Lord Herries told me), and
a very different thing, as one of Disraeli's country squires in
_Lothair_ remarks, from a mere park with deer in it. The weather was
bright and hot; and it was a pretty sight to see the droves of
fallow-deer, bucks and does together, clustering for shade under the
great trees near the house. From Everingham I went on to Bramham,
where George Lane Fox was spending a happy summer in his old home. He
took me everywhere, through the lovely gardens laid out by Lenotre, and
(in a brougham drawn by an ancient hunter and driven by a stud-groom
not less ancient) all over the park, and up the noble beech avenue
called Bingley's Walk. My friend had lost his splendid inheritance for
conscience' sake; and it was pleasant to see him, in old age and
enfeebled health, passing happy days, through his nephew's hospitality
and kindness, at the well-loved home of his boyhood and youth.
I was glad to find myself settled for some golden weeks of August and
September at our abbey among {97} the Highland hills, where we were
this autumn favoured with almost continuous sunshine. Our many guests
came and went--some of them busy city men, enjoying to the full the
pure air, lovely surroundings, and quiet life in our guest-house, all
to the accompaniment of chiming bells and chanted psalms. Whether they
found our "brown Gregorians" as devotional as the sentimentalist of Mr.
Hichens's novel[1] I know not; but anyhow to me our monastic
plain-chant was restful and pleasant after the odd stuff in the way of
"church music" which had elsewhere assailed my ears. I confess that
after our more normal Oxford hours (though I hope we were not sluggards
at our Hall), I reconciled myself with difficulty to "the hour of our
uprising" in the monastery. The four o'clock matin-bell had always
been more or less of a penance to me (as I suppose it was to most of my
brethren), though I tried to fortify myself with Dr. Johnson's
argument--a purely academic one in the case of that lie-abed old
sage--that "it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many more
hours the _consciousness of being_"; but an American guest of ours, to
whom I cited this dictum, countered it by a forcibly-expressed opinion
"on the other side" by one of the most eminent living specialists in
insanity.[2]
{98}
One recalls delicious rambles with our brethren or our guests during
those sunlit autumn days: sometimes among the verdant Glengarry woods,
sometimes at our outlying "chapel-of-ease," some miles up the most
beautiful of the glens which run from Central Inverness-shire to the
sea. A veritable oasis this among the hills, with its green meadows,
waving pines, and graceful bridge spanning the rushing river; and all
framing the humble chapel, its eastern wall adorned with a fresco (from
the brush of one of our artist monks[3]) which the little flock--sadly
diminished of late years by emigration--greatly admired and venerated.
A week-end was sometimes spent pleasantly and not unprofitably at some
remote shooting-lodge, saying mass for Catholic tenants, and perhaps a
handful of faithful {99} Highlanders. One such visit I remember this
autumn at a lodge in Glencarron, a wild wind-swept place, with the
surrounding hilltops already snow-coated, which Lord Wimborne (for some
years Lovat's tenant at Beaufort) had recently acquired. Although in
the heart of the forest, the lodge was but two hundred yards from the
railway; there was no station, but the train would obligingly stop when
signalled by the wave of a napkin from the front door! A crofter's cow
strayed on the line one day of my stay, was, by bad luck, run over by
one of the infrequent trains, and (as a newspaper report once said of a
similar mischance) "cut literally into _calves_."[4] The night before
I left Glencarron, we were all wakened, and some of us not a little
perturbed, by two very perceptible shocks of earthquake--a phenomenon
not unusual in the district. We heard afterwards that at Glenelg, on
the west coast, the shocks had been more severe, and some damage had
been done; but, as a witty member of our party remarked, Glenelg might
have been turned inside out, or upside down, without suffering any
appreciable change.[5] On my way back to Fort Augustus I stayed a day
at Beaufort to wish _bon voyage_ to Lovat's brother-in-law and sister,
who were just off {100} to visit another married sister at our Embassy
in Japan, and (incidentally) to travel round the world. I met on the
steamer on my way home one of my Wauchope cousins, a spinster lady who
had gone some time before to live in Rome, and had asked me for letters
of introduction to "two or three Cardinals." Tired of Rome, she was
now making for the somewhat different _milieu_ of Rotherhithe, with
some work of the kind popularly called "slumming" in view.
I visited, on my way south, a married brother at his charming home in
Berwickshire, where there was much tennis, and pleasant expeditions by
motor to interesting spots on both sides of the Border. One lovely
autumn day we spent at Manderston, where our hostess had her brother,
my lord chancellor of Oxford University, staying with her. The great
man was very affable, and asked me to go and see him in Michaelmas
Term, when he would be in residence at the "Judge's Lodgings" in St.
Giles's. I joined a family gathering at Newhailes, a few days later,
for the pretty wedding of my niece, Christian Dalrymple--"a very
composed bride," remarked one of the reporters present, "as befitted a
lady who had acted as hostess to the leading lights of the Conservative
party ever since she left the schoolroom."[6] Her uncle, the Bishop of
Bath and Wells, tied the knot (of course "impressively"), and I was
glad to find myself at Newhailes in his always pleasant {101} company.
Driving with him to pay a call or two in the neighbourhood, I amused
him with an _a propos_ story of the bishop who rode out on a long round
of leaving-calls, attended by his groom, who was sent into the house,
before starting, to get some cards. When they reached the last house,
the order came, "Leave two cards here, James"; and the unexpected reply
followed: "I can't, my lord; there's only the ace of spades left!"
After a few days at Niddrie Marischal, the fascinating old seat of the
Wauchopes near Edinburgh (General "Andie" Wauchope's widow had lived
there since her husband's gallant death at Magersfontein), I went to
Cumbrae to visit Lady Bute at the Garrison, her home on that quaint
island in the Firth of Clyde. The house, too, was quaint though
comfortable, built in semi-ecclesiastical Gothic, with a sunk garden in
front, and a charming moonlight view from my window of the broad Firth,
with the twinkling lights of the tiny town in the foreground. Millport
was a favourite "doon-the-water" resort for Glasgow folk on holiday;
and I had quite a congregation at my Sunday mass in the little chapel
in the grounds, as well as a considerable catechism-class afterwards.
Winifred Lady Howard of Glossop, my lady's stepmother, was paying her a
visit, and as an inveterate globe-trotter (if the word may be
respectfully applied to an elderly peeress) kept us entertained by
stories of men and things in many lands. I spent one afternoon at the
college and "cathedral" of the Isles, the quaint group of buildings,
redolent of Butterfield and looking like an Oxford college and chapel
through the wrong end of a telescope, which the sixth Earl of Glasgow
(my {102} brother-in-law's predecessor) had more or less ruined himself
in erecting. Provost Ball, whom I found at tea with his sisters,
received me kindly, and showed me the whole establishment, which looked
rather derelict and neglected (I fancy there was very little money to
keep it going); and the college had been closed for some years. Some
of us crossed the Firth next day in an absurd little cockle of a
motor-boat (unsuitable, I thought, for those sometimes stormy seas),
and I was glad to find myself on _terra firma_, in a comfortable White
steam-car--my first experience of that mode of propulsion--which
whirled us smoothly and swiftly to Glasgow, in time for me to take the
night train to London and Oxford.
In university circles I found a certain amount of uneasy trepidation
owing to the official presence of Lord Curzon. A resident Chancellor
was a phenomenon unprecedented for centuries, and one unprovided for in
the traditional university ritual, in which the first place was
naturally assigned to the Vice-chancellor. There was much talk as to
when, and in what direction, the new broom would begin to sweep, and
amusing stories (probably _ben trovati_) of dignified heads of houses
being called over the coals at meetings of the Hebdomadal Council.
Personally the Chancellor made himself very agreeable, entertaining
everybody who was anybody at his fine old mansion, once the "town
house" of the Dukes of Marlborough. It was all, perhaps, a little
Vice-regal for us simple Oxonians, who were not accustomed to write our
names in a big book when we made an afternoon call, or to be received
by a secretary or other underling instead of by our host when we went
out to luncheon or dinner. But it {103} was all rather novel and
interesting; and in any case the little ripples caused on the surface
of Oxford society by our Chancellor's sayings and doings soon subsided;
for, as far as I remember, his term of residence did not exceed a month
or so altogether. I was kept busy all this autumn term by the
considerable work I had undertaken (the contribution of nearly eighty
articles) for the American _Catholic Encyclopaedia_. One of the longest
was on Cambridge; and I felt on its completion that I knew much more
about the "sister university" than about my own! Most of my work was
done in the Bodleian Library; and it was a pleasant and welcome change
to find oneself installed in the new, well-lighted and comfortable
reading-room arranged in one of the long picture-galleries, instead of
(as heretofore) in an obscure and inconvenient corner of Duke
Humphrey's mediaeval chamber. The then Bodley's Librarian was a bit of
an oddity, and perhaps not an ideal holder of one of the most difficult
and exacting offices in the university; but he was always kindness
itself to me, and, whatever his preoccupations, was always ready to put
at my service his unrivalled knowledge of books and their writers. His
memory was stored with all kinds of whimsical rhymes: sometimes he
would stop me in the street, and--at imminent peril of being run over,
for he was extraordinarily short-sighted--would peer in my face through
his big spectacles, and say, "Did you ever hear of
----the learned Archdeacon of York,
Who _would_ eat his soup with a knife and a fork:
A feat which he managed so neatly and cleverly,
That they made him the Suffragan Bishop of Beverley!"
{104} Or it would be, perhaps, "Listen to this new version of an old
saw:
Teach not your parent's mother to extract
The embryo juices of an egg by suction:
The aged lady can the feat enact
Quite irrespective of your kind instruction."
And before I had time to smile at the quip I would be dragging my
friend off the roadway on to the pavement to escape the oncoming
tramcar, bicycle or hansom cab. Sometimes we walked together, usually
in quest of some relic of antiquity in the neighbourhood, in which he
would display the most lively interest, though I really believe it was
all but invisible to his bodily eyes. One such walk was to inspect the
old lepers' chapel of St. Bartholomew, in the fields near Cowley--a
lovely derelict fragment of the ages of faith, which the local Anglican
clergy had expressed their intention of "restoring to the ancient
worship." "_You_," said my friend the librarian, with his ironic
smile, "will doubtless regard this promise as what our friend Dean
Burgon would have called 'polished banter,'" the allusion being to a
phrase in a sermon preached by the future Dean of Chichester at St.
Mary's at the time when the spread of the so-called "aesthetic movement"
was causing some concern to sensible people. "These are days," he
cried, "when we hear men speak, not in polished banter, but in sober
earnest, of 'living up to their blue china!'" I heard him speak these
words myself; and recalling that inimitable tone and accent, can
imagine the impression made by a more memorable utterance from the same
pulpit, when the new doctrines of Darwin were in the air, and the
alleged affinity of man with monkey was {105} fluttering orthodox
dovecotes. "O ye men of science! O ye men of science! leave me my
ancestors in Paradise, and I will willingly leave you yours in the
Zoological Gardens!"
I had the pleasure in November of paying a short visit to the wise and
good Bishop of Newport, for a church-opening at Cardiff. A profit as
well as a pleasure, one may hope; for indeed no one could spend any
time in Dr. Hedley's company without instruction as well as
edification. We spoke of the late Lord Bute's remarkable philological
gifts; and I asked the Bishop if he had found his ignorance of Welsh
any practical hindrance to the work of his diocese. "No," was his
reply. "Fortunately for me (for I am no Mezzofanti) I find English a
good enough means of communication with my people, the majority of whom
are neither Welsh nor English, but Irish." I told him, much to his
amusement, of the advice once given to an Englishman appointed to a
Welsh (Anglican) see, as to the proper pronunciation of the Welsh
double _l_. "May it please your lordship to place your episcopal
tongue lightly against your right reverend teeth, and to hiss like a
goose!" A young Oxford friend of mine whom I met at Cardiff carried me
thence to Lichfield to stay a night at the Choristers' House of which
his father was master. It chanced to be "Guy Fawkes Day," and I
assisted at the fireworks and bonfires of the little singing-boys, who
(I was rather interested to find) did not associate their celebration
in the slightest degree with the old "No Popery" tradition. The merry
evening concluded with some delightful part-singing.
I recall a week-end at Arundel when term was over: a large and cheerful
party, and the usual {106} "parlour games" after dinner, including
dumb-crambo, in which I was almost the only spectator; for everybody
else was acting, the Duke being a polar bear rolled up in a white
hearthrug! My customary Christmas was spent at Beaufort, in a
much-diminished family circle. Lord Lovat was on his way home from
South Africa, one brother absent on a sporting tour in Abyssinia,
another gold-mining in Rhodesia; his second sister with her husband in
Japan, and two others still _en voyage_ round the world. Some
schoolboy nephews, however, and their young sisters, were a cheerful
element in our little party, and there was a great deal of golf, good,
bad, and indifferent, on the not exactly first-class course recently
laid out in the park.[7] I had to go south soon after New Year, to tie
the knot and preach the wedding sermon at a marriage in Spanish Place
Church.[8] A thoroughly Scottish function it was, with Gordon
Highlander sergeants lining the long nave, the bridegroom's kilted
brother-officers forming a triumphal arch with their claymores, and a
big gathering of friends from the north afterwards at the Duchess of
Roxburghe's pretty house in Grosvenor Street. I attended next evening
at our Westminster dining-club, and heard {107} Father Maturin read a
clever, if not quite convincing paper, on "The Broad and Narrow Mind,"
some of his paradoxes provoking a lively subsequent discussion which I
found very interesting. I had a stimulating neighbour in Baron Anatole
von Huegel.
The opening of the Lent Term of 1908 at Oxford was dreary enough, with
a succession of the dense white fogs which only the Thames valley
generates in perfection. It is not cheering to come down morning after
morning to find what looks like a huge bale of dirty cotton-wool piled
up against one's window-panes; and the news at this time was as
depressing as the weather. We heard early in February of the brutal
murder of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal, before the eyes of
wife and mother; and I was saddened in the same month by the death of
an exemplary member of our community at Fort Augustus, though that had
been long expected. I was myself on the sick-list, and recall little
of interest during these weeks, except a most excellent lecture--of
course on boy scouts--given by General Baden-Powell, which I only
wished could have been heard, not by dons, ladies, and undergraduates,
but by the cigarette-slobbering, street-corner-loafing lads who were, I
think, more in evidence at Oxford than anywhere else. Early in March I
was in London, for the wedding of my old pupil, Charles Vaughan of
Courtfield, to the pretty niece of the Duke of Newcastle. I got to
Westminster Cathedral an hour before the appointed time: the
chapter-mass was being celebrated, and waves of sonorous plain-song
floating about the great misty domes overhead. After the ceremony I
joined the wedding guests at the Ritz for a short time, and, amid the
_frou-frou_ {108} and _va-et-vient_ of all the smart people, managed to
impart to a few intimate friends the news that I was going into
hospital in a few days, with no very certain prospect of coming out
alive!
The next fortnight or so was of course taken up with inevitable
worries--giving up work for an indefinite period, resigning for a time
(it turned out to be for good) the mastership of my Hall, and finding a
_locum tenens_ letter-writing to a host of inquiring friends, and all
this when physically fit to do nothing. I spent the last days of
freedom at Arundel, receiving from the good people there every possible
kindness; and on March 18, under the patronage of the Archangel Gabriel
(saint of the day), betook myself to my nursing home in Mandeville
Street. Nurses (mine were most kind and devoted), surgeons and
anaesthetists soon got to work; and for a time at least (in the almost
classic words of Bret Harte) "the subsequent proceedings interested me
no more."
A critical operation, followed by a slow and difficult convalescence,
ranks, of course, among the deeper experiences of a man's life. "We
were all anxious," said an Oxford friend some weeks later, a good old
chemist whom I had known for years; "for we heard that you were passing
through very deep waters." The expression was an apt one; and I
suppose no one rises from such waters quite the same man as he was
before. This is not the place to dwell on such thoughts; but one
reflection which occurs to me is that in such a time as I am now
recalling one realizes, as perhaps one had never done before, how many
kind people there are in the world, and appreciates what true
friendship is. During {109} my long stay in hospital my nearest
relations chanced to be greatly scattered, some of them in very remote
parts of the world. This made me all the more grateful for the
extraordinary kindness and attention I received, not only from approved
friends, but from many others whom I had hardly ventured to count as
such. I remember a little later compiling a kind of _libro d'oro_,
with a list of the names of all who had been good to me in word or deed
during those weary weeks. Some of them I have hardly ever seen since:
many have passed beyond the sphere of one's gratitude here on earth;
but I still sometimes con my list, and thank the dead as well as the
living for what they did for me then.
I remember my first drive--round Regent's Park, on a perfect May day,
in the steam-car of which I have already spoken; and very tiring I
found it. After a lazy fortnight at St. John's Lodge, and daily
trundles in a Bath chair among the gay flower-beds of the park, I was
able to get down into the country; and after a sojourn with Lady
Encombe and her two jolly little boys near Rickmansworth (a wonderfully
rural spot, considering its nearness to London), I made my way to
Arundel, where it was pleasant to meet the Herries's and other kind
friends. The great excitement there was the hoped-for advent of a son
and heir, who made a punctual and welcome appearance before the end of
the month, and was received, of course, with public and private
jubilations in which I was happy to be able to participate. After this
I paid quite a long visit to my soldier brother at Kneller Court, the
pretty place near Fareham which he was occupying while commanding the
Artillery in that district. There were plenty of {110} pleasant
neighbours, who treated me to pleasant motor-drives through a charming
country little known to me; and the elm-shaded hall (I believe Sir
Godfrey Kneller had really lived there once), with its gay old garden
and excellent tennis-lawn, was a popular resort for young officers from
Portsmouth and elsewhere, who dropped in almost daily to luncheon, tea,
or dinner, and doubtless found the society of a kind hostess and her
two pretty daughters a welcome diversion from their naval and military
duties. One June day we spent in Portsmouth, lunching with Sir Arthur
and Lady Fanshawe at Admiralty House, a big, cool roomy mansion like a
French chateau, full of fine old portraits. We went out afterwards on
the flag-captain's launch to see the _Victory_, a visit full of
interest, though I was unequal to climbing the companions connecting
the five decks. A man whom I sat next at tea in the Admiral's garden
said he was connected with the Patent Office (I do not think he was
actually Comptroller-General, but he was something high up in that
rather mysterious department of the Civil Service), and told me some
entertaining yarns about early patents and monopolies.[9] One was
granted in 1618 to two men called Atkinson and Morgan, "to find out
things in monasteries!" Another man, about the same time, secured the
exclusive right of importing lobsters, which had hitherto cost a penny;
but the patentee bought them out at sea from Dutch fishermen, and {111}
sold them at threepence. In Charles I.'s reign a "doctour in phisick"
called Grant got a patent for a "fishe-call, or looking-glass for
fishes in the sea, very useful for fishermen to call all manner of
fishes to their netts, seins, or hooks." In the same reign it was made
compulsory to bury the dead in woollen in order to encourage the wool
manufacture; and ten years later Widow Amy Potter got a (rather
gruesome) patent for the elegant woollen costume she devised for this
purpose.[10]
I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain
Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left
practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just
purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No
brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose
whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his
brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing
and coaching, were the salt of life. He had arranged his brother's
miscellaneous treasures, in one or two spacious rooms, with great care
and pains; and it was a curious experience to pass out of an atmosphere
and environment of religious paintings, Roman bookbindings, panels from
cardinals' coaches, Papal coins and medals, Italian ecclesiological
literature, and what the {112} French call _objets de piete_ of every
description, to the ex-lancer's own cheerful living-rooms: the walls
hung with pictures of hunters, steeplechasers, coaching and sporting
scenes; stuffed heads, tiger-skins, and other trophies of the chase
everywhere about, and the windows looking out on a pretty garden, in
the improvement and cultivation of which the owner was promising
himself unfailing interest and occupation.
"Doctor Brighton" (was not this affectionate sobriquet the invention of
Thackeray?) did much for the restoration of my health and strength; and
I was able to get to Oxford before the end of summer term, to spend a
fortnight with kind Monsignor Kennard at his charming old house in St.
Aldate's, where I had a room so close to Tom Tower that the "Great Bell
of Tom" sounded as if it were tolling at my bedside![11] In his pretty
chapel (of which the open roof was said to be a relic of Oseney Abbey),
I had the happiness, on Trinity Sunday, of celebrating Mass for the
first time for more than three months--a greatly-appreciated privilege.
[1] "A brown Gregorian is so devotional.... Gregorians are obviously
of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent
magenta."
[2] Dr. Selden Talcott, of the State Asylum, Middleton, New York;
according to whom early rising is the most prolific cause of madness.
"A peremptory command to get up, when one's sleep is as yet unfinished,
is a command which grinds the soul, curdles the blood, swells the
spleen, destroys all good intentions, and disturbs all day the mental
activities, just as the tornado disturbs and levels with advancing ruin
the forest of mighty pines.... The free and lazy savage gets up when
he feels ready, and rarely or never becomes insane." Dr. Talcott
quotes the percentage of lunacy among country people as compared with
professional men. The latter, almost without exception, get up
comparatively late, whereas our manual labourers all leave their beds
long before they should. "The early morning hours, when everything is
still, are peculiarly fitted for sleep; and it is a _gross violation of
Nature's laws_ to tear human brains out of the sound rest they enjoy at
this time." A weighty utterance, no doubt: still, it is but fair to
point out that among monks, who perhaps, as a class, get up earlier
than any men living, the number of those whose good intentions are
destroyed and mental activities disturbed, and who finally become
lunatics, is really not alarmingly large.
[3] Dom Paulinus Gorwood, who had been a choirboy at Beverley Minster,
and draughtsman in a great shipbuilding yard, and had studied religious
art in the famous Beuron Benedictine school at Prague. He had industry
as well as talent; and there were specimens of his handiwork in places
as remote from one another as the Highland Catholic Church at Beauly,
and the college chapel at St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate.
[4] This printer's feat somehow reminds me of the statement in an
Edinburgh paper that a certain eminent tenor, who had had a bad fall
alighting from the train, was nevertheless "able to appear that evening
at the concert in several pieces." But the funniest printer's slip
which I remember in connection with trains was an announcement in a
Hampshire newspaper that "The Express Engine was seriously indisposed,
and confined to bed." The distinguished invalid was really the Empress
Eugenie!
[5] The word Glenelg is, of course, a palindrome, reading backwards and
forwards alike.
[6] Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, and Arthur Balfour were
only a few among the political magnates who had enjoyed my
brother-in-law's hospitality in the fine old Georgian mansion where
Lord Hailes had entertained Dr. Johnson. Newhailes was, of course, a
very convenient "jumping-off" place for meetings in the Scottish
metropolis.
[7] About as good, perhaps, as a certain English nine-hole course over
which the secretary invited (partly by way of advertising his club) a
famous golfer to play. "Well, what do you think of our course?" asked
the secretary with some trepidation when the game was over. "Oh well,
it might be worse," was the great man's answer. "How do you mean
exactly, might be worse?" "Well," said the eminent golfer, "there
might be eighteen holes!"
[8] That of Alister Gordon, of the Gordon Highlanders, to a sister of
Charles Edmonstoune-Cranstoun, an old pupil of mine. The bridegroom
was a fine soldier, became Brigadier-General in the European War, and
fell gallantly at Ypres in July, 1917.
[9] My well-informed friend told me, if I remember right, that statutes
having been passed in more recent times, limiting the grant of patents
to actual new inventions, scientific or otherwise, nothing so amusing
as the instances he quoted were to be found in their modern records.
[10] Not more gruesome, perhaps, than an exhibition organized at
Stafford House, in my young days about London, by Anne Duchess of
Sutherland, of _wicker-work coffins_. They were spread about the
garden, where tea was likewise provided; and a dapper and smiling young
man (I suppose the patentee) was in attendance to point out the
advantages--sanitary, economic, and aesthetic--of his invention to the
Duchess's interested guests.
[11] I could not claim the concession (I believe unique) granted to an
old Captain De Moleyns, who lived--and died--close to Christ Church,
and during whose last days the immemorial ringing of "Tom" was
suspended. He was a man of very advanced age, and used to tell how as
a little boy he was rowed across Plymouth Harbour to see Napoleon
standing on the deck of the _Bellerophon_!
{113}
CHAPTER VII
1908
I passed the closing days of the summer term of 1908 very pleasantly at
Oxford, receiving many kindnesses from old friends, mingled with
expressions of regret that my official connection with the university
was approaching its close. I recall an interesting dinner-party at
Black Hall, the Morrells' delightful old house in St. Giles's, where my
neighbour was Miss Rhoda Broughton, at that time resident near Oxford.
We talked, of course, of her novels; and the pleasant-faced,
grey-haired lady was amused to hear that my sisters were not allowed to
read _Cometh Up as a Flower_, and _Red as a Rose is She_[1] (considered
strong literary food in the early 'seventies), until they "came out."
Mrs. Temple, the archbishop's widow, was also a fellow-guest: she had
taken a house in Oxford, close to "dear Keble"; but said that the noise
and uproar emanating at night from the college of "low living and high
thinking" was so great that she thought she would have to move. A
member of the lately-established {114} Faculty, or Institute, of
Forestry, who was of our party, told us some "things not generally
known" about trees, which I noted down. The biggest tree known in the
world was, he said, not in America (what a relief!), but the great
chestnut at the foot of Mount Etna, called the Chestnut of a Hundred
Horses, with a trunk over 200 ft. round, and a hole through it through
which two carriages can drive abreast. The biggest orange-tree known
was, said our oracle, in Terre Bonne, Louisiana: 50 ft. high, 15 ft.
round at base, and yielding 10,000 oranges annually. Finally, the most
valuable tree in existence was the plane-tree in Wood Street, in the
City, occupying a space worth, if rented, L300 a year--a capital value
of L9,000 or thereabouts. All these facts I thought curious.
Term over, I stayed for a little time with a sister in Kensington Gore,
very handy for Kensington Gardens, where I sat an hour or two every
morning enjoying the fresh air and verdure of that most charming of
"London's lungs," and surrounded by frolicking children, including my
small nephew. One of his little playfellows, a grandson of Lord
Portman, suddenly disappeared from the gay scene; I inquired where he
was, and was told that he had gone for a rest-cure. "Great heavens!" I
said, "a child of three!--but why, and where?"--"Oh," was the reply,
"Master Portman was taking too much notice of the busses and motor-cars
and such-like, and wouldn't go to sleep; so he is taking a rest-cure in
his nursery at the top of the house, looking over the chimney-pots!"
The modern child! but then I do not of course profess to understand
infants and their ways and needs.
{115}
The White City, with its Irish village, and a notable exhibition of
French and English pictures, was a great attraction this summer. A
kind cousin motored me thither once or twice; and I met a little later
at her house some pleasant Italian cavalry officers, smart in their
Eton blue uniforms, who were going to jump at the horse-show at
Olympia. I went, at their urgent invitation, to see their performance,
and was both interested and impressed. As an exhibition of the art of
show-jumping i
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