Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography Part 14

On the 6th of September, 1893, I heard the Duke speaking on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill. He was then an old man, and in broken health; the speech attempted little in the way of argument, and was desultory beyond belief. But suddenly there came a pa.s.sage which lifted the whole debate into a n.o.bler air. The orator described himself standing on the Western sh.o.r.es of Scotland, and gazing across towards the hills of Antrim: "We can see the colour of their fields, and in the sunset we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of the cabins of the people. This is the country, I thought the other day when I looked on the scene--this is the country which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this great master of oratory was a master-stroke of dramatic art.

Before I close this chapter, I should like to recall a word of Gladstone's which at the time when he said it struck me as memorable. In August, 1895, I was staying at Hawarden. Gladstone's Parliamentary life was done, and he talked about political people and events with a freedom which I had never before known in him. As perhaps was natural, we fell to discussing the men who had been his colleagues in the late Liberal Ministry. We reviewed in turn Lord Spencer, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Asquith. It is perhaps a little curious, in view of what happened later on, that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not mentioned; but, with regard to the foregoing names, I perfectly recollect, though there is no need to repeat, the terse and trenchant judgment pa.s.sed on each. When we had come to the end of my list, the ex-Premier turned on me with one of those compelling glances which we knew so well, and said with emphasis, "But you haven't mentioned the most important man of all." "Who is that?" "Edward Grey--there is the man with the real Parliamentary gift."

I am happy to make the Foreign Secretary a present of this handsome compliment.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Mucius Scaevola per multos annos "Princeps Senatus."

[43] Bulwer-Lytton, _St. Stephen's_.

[44] Mr. A. J. Willams, Mr. A. G. Symond, Mr. Walter Wren, Mr. W. L.

Bright, and Mr. J. J. Tylor were some of them; and we used to meet in Mr. Bright's rooms at Storey's Gate.

[45] "It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, s.h.i.+ny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr.

Gladstone."--H. G. Wells, _The New Machiavelli_.

[46] "Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of a very different character."

[47] The others were the late Duke of Argyll and the eighth Lord Elgin.

[48] "I had to speak in the House of Lords last night. It is a really terrible place for the unaccustomed. Frigid impatience and absolute goodwill, combined with a thorough conviction of the infallibility of laymen (if not too religious) on all sacred subjects, are the tone, _morale_, and reason, of the House as a living being. My whole self-possession departs, and ejection from the House seems the best thing which could happen to one."--Archbishop Benson to the Rev. B. F.

Westcott, March 22, 1884.

XIII

LITERATURE

There was Captain Sumph, an ex-beau, still about town, and related in some indistinct manner to Literature and the Peerage. He was said to have written a book once, to have been a friend of Lord Byron, to be related to Lord Sumphington.... This gentleman was listened to with great attention by Mrs. Bungay; his anecdotes of the Aristocracy, of which he was a middle-aged member, delighted the publisher's lady.

W. M. THACKERAY, _Pendennis_.

When I am writing Reminiscences, I always feel dreadfully like Captain Sumph; but, in order to make the resemblance quite exact, I must devote a chapter to Literature.

I seem, from my earliest conscious years, to have lived in a world of books; and yet my home was by no means "bookish." I was trained by people who had not read much, but had read thoroughly; who regarded good literature with unfeigned admiration; and who, though they would never have dreamt of forcing or cramming, yet were pleased when they saw a boy inclined to read, and did their best to guide his reading aright. As I survey my early life and compare it with the present day, one of the social changes which impresses me most is the general decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to chatter about the authors.h.i.+p of the Fourth Gospel, or to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity, instead of an address, at the end of a fas.h.i.+onable wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?" Everyone can patter nonsense about the traces of Bacon's influence in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and can ransack their family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when _Cymbeline_ was put on the stage, Society was startled to find that the princ.i.p.al part was not a woman's.

When some excellent scenes from Jane Austen were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr.

and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else. I have known a Lord Chief Justice who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an auth.o.r.ess who did not know the name of Izaak Walton.

Perhaps these curious "ignorances," as the Prayer Book calls them, impressed me the more forcibly because I was born a Whig, and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning; and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture: the Tories may have been just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings"; one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope the Historian, and Sir Edward Bunbury the Senior Cla.s.sic; or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina, Lady Dacre, and Georgiana, Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their cla.s.s, and had profited by it.

Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, a boy might learn much, or learn nothing; but he could not learn superficially. A similar remark would have applied to the attainments of people who were old when I was young. They might know much, or they might know nothing; but they did not know superficially. What they professed to know, that you could be sure they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was avowed. For example, everyone knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been at a University, but had pa.s.sed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings, and corrupt texts, and difficult pa.s.sages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man," or whether it was only his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole ma.s.s of the Plays with a natural and unforced intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Pope was quoted whenever the occasion suggested him, and Johnson was esteemed the Prince of Critics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; Wordsworth was tolerated, and Tennyson was "coming in." Everyone knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.

I said in a former chapter that I had from my earliest days free access to an excellent library; and, even before I could read comfortably by myself, my interest in books was stimulated by listening to my elders as they read aloud. The magic of words and cadence--the purely sensuous pleasure of melodious sound--stirred me from the time when I was quite a child. Poetry, of course, came first; but prose was not much later. I had by nature a good memory, and it retained, by no effort on my part, my favourite bits of Macaulay and Scott. _The Battle of Lake Regillus_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the death of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, are samples of the literature with which my mind was stored. Every boy, I suppose, attempts to imitate what he admires, and I was eternally scribbling. When I was eleven, I began a novel, of which the heroine was a modern Die Vernon. At twelve, I took to versification, for which the swinging couplets of _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ supplied the model. Fragments of prose and verse came thick and fast. When I was thirteen, I made my first appearance in print; with a set of verses on a Volunteer Encampment, which really were not at all bad; and at fourteen I published (anonymously) a religious tract, which had some success in Evangelical circles.

The effect of Harrow was both to stimulate and to discipline my taste for literature. It was my good fortune to be taught my Sophocles and Euripides, Tacitus and Virgil, by scholars who had the literary sense, and could enrich school-lessons with all the resources of a generous culture. My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought me a real and conscious growth in the things of the mind, and with that period of my life I must always gratefully a.s.sociate the names of Frederic Farrar, Edward Bowen, and Arthur Watson.[49]

Meanwhile I was not only learning, but also practising. My teachers with one accord incited me to write. Essay-writing formed a regular part of our work in school and pupil-room, and I composed a great deal for my own amus.e.m.e.nt. I wrote both prose and verse, and verse in a great many metres; but it was soon borne in upon me--conclusively after I had been beaten for the Prize Poem[50]--that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In prose, I was more successful. My work for _The Harrovian_ gave me constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture.

The "Young Lion" of the _Daily Telegraph_ thus "roared" over my performance--

"The English Essay now takes a higher place on Speech Day than it did in the old season; and the essay which was crowned yesterday was notable alike for the theme, the opinions, and the literary promise of the writer. The young author bore the historical name of Russell, and he was really reviewing the forerunners and the fellow-workers of his own ancestors, in describing the rhetorical powers of the elder and the younger Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Canning and Grey.... The well-known Const.i.tutional note of Lord Russell was heard in every page, and the sonorous English was such as the Earl himself might have written fifty years ago, if the undergraduates of that day had been able to copy a Macaulay. The essayist has read the prose of that dangerous model until he has imitated the well-known and now hackneyed devices of the great rhetorician with a closeness which perilously brought to mind the show pa.s.sages of the 'Essays' and the 'History.' Mr. Russell has caught the trick of cutting up his paragraphs into rolling periods, and short, sharp, and disjointed sentences; but he will go to more subtle and more simple masters of style than Macaulay, when he shall have pa.s.sed the rhetorical stage of youth."

This prophecy was soon fulfilled, and indeed the process of fulfilment had already begun. In the Sixth Form, we naturally were influenced by Dr. Butler, who, though he certainly did not despise fine rhetoric, wrote a beautifully simple style, and constantly instructed us in the difference between eloquence and journalese. "Let us leave _commence_ and _partake_ to the newspapers," was an admonition often on his lips.

Our Composition Masters were Edward Young, an exquisite scholar of the Eton type, and the accomplished Henry Nettles.h.i.+p, who detested flamboyancy, and taught us to admire Newman's incomparable easiness and grace. And there was Matthew Arnold living on the Hill, generously encouraging every bud of literary promise, and always warning us against our tendency to "Middle-cla.s.s Macaulayese."

At Oxford, the chastening process went on apace. Newman became my master, as far as language was concerned; and I learned to bracket him with Arnold and Church as possessing "The Oriel style." Thackeray's Latinized constructions began to fascinate me; and, though I still loved gorgeous diction, I sought it from Ruskin instead of Macaulay.

All this time I was writing--in a very humble and obscure way, certainly, but still writing. I wrote in local newspapers and Parish Magazines. I published anonymous comments on current topics. I contributed secretly to ephemeral journals. I gave lectures and printed them as pamphlets. It was all very good exercise; but the odd part of it seems to me, in looking back, that I never expected pay, but rather spent my own money in printing what I wrote. That last infirmity of literary minds I laid aside soon after I left Oxford. I rather think that the first money which I made with my pen was payment for a character-study of my uncle, Lord Russell, which I wrote for _The World_; thereby eliciting from Matthew Arnold the urbane remark, "Ah, my dear George, I hear you have become one of Yates's hired stabbers."

After I entered Parliament, opportunities of writing, and of writing for profit, became more frequent. I contributed to the _Quarterly_, the _New Quarterly_, the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Fortnightly_, the _Contemporary_, the _Spectator_, and the _Pall Mall_. Yet another magazine recurs pleasantly to my mind, because of the warning which was inscribed on one's proof-sheet--"The cost of _corrigenda_ will be deducted from _honoraria_." What fine language! and what a base economy!

It did not take me long to find that the society in which I habitually lived, and which I have described in a former chapter, was profoundly ignorant. A most amusing law-suit between a d.u.c.h.ess and her maid took place about the time of which I am writing, and the d.u.c.h.ess's incriminated letter, beginning in the third person, wandering off into the first, and returning with an effort to the third, was indeed an object-lesson in English composition. A young sprig of fas.h.i.+on once said to me, in the tone of a man who utters an accepted truth, "It is so much more interesting to talk about people than things"--even though those "things" were the literary triumphs of humour or tragedy. In one great house, Books were a prohibited subject, and the word "Books" was construed with such liberal lat.i.tude that it seemed to include everything except Bradshaw. Even where people did not thus truculently declare war against literature, they gave it an uncommonly wide berth, and shrank with ill-concealed aversion from such names as Meredith and Browning. "Meredith," said Oscar Wilde, "is a prose-Browning--and so is Browning." And both those forms of prose were equally eschewed by society.

Of course, when one is surveying a whole cla.s.s, one sees some conspicuous exceptions to the prevailing colour; and here and there one had the pleasure of meeting in society persons admirably accomplished. I have already mentioned Lord Houghton, poet, essayist, pamphleteer, book-lover, and book-collector, who was equally at home in the world of society and the world of literature. Nothing that was good in books, whether ancient or modern, escaped his curious scrutiny, and at his hospitable table, which might truly be called a "Festive Board,"

authors great and small rubbed shoulders with dandies and diplomats and statesmen. On the 16th of June, 1863, Matthew Arnold wrote--"On Sunday I dined with Monckton Milnes,[51] and met all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume.... The philosophers were fearful! George Lewes, Herbert Spencer, a sort of pseudo-Sh.e.l.ley called Swinburne, and so on. Froude, however, was there, and Browning, and Ruskin."

The mention of Matthew Arnold reminds me that, though I had admired and liked him in a reverent sort of way, when I was a Harrow boy and he was a man, I found him even more fascinating when I met him on the more even terms of social life in London. He was indeed the most delightful of companions; a man of the world entirely free from worldliness, and a man of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry. He walked through the world enjoying it and loving it; and yet all the time one felt that his "eyes were on the higher loadstars" of the intellect and the spirit. In those days I used to say that, if one could fas.h.i.+on oneself, I should wish to be like Matthew Arnold; and the lapse of years has not altered my desire.

Of Robert Browning, as he appeared in society, I have already spoken; but here let me add an instance which well ill.u.s.trates his tact and readiness. He once did me the honour of dining with me, and I had collected a group of eager disciples to meet him. As soon as dinner was over, one of these enthusiasts led the great man into a corner, and began cross-examining him about the ident.i.ty of _The Lost Leader_ and the meaning of _Sordello_. For a s.p.a.ce Browning bore the catechism with admirable patience; and then, laying his hand on the questioner's shoulder, he exclaimed, "But, my dear fellow, this is too bad. _I_ am monopolizing _you_," and skipped out of the corner.

Lord Tennyson was scarcely ever to be encountered in society; but I was presented to him at a garden-party by Mr. James Knowles, of the _Nineteenth Century_. He was, is, and always will be, one of the chief divinities of my poetical heaven; but he was more wors.h.i.+pful at a distance than at close quarters, and I was determined not to dispel illusion by a too near approach to the shrine. J. A. Froude was a man of letters whom from time to time one encountered in society. No one could doubt his cleverness; but it was a cleverness which rather repelled than attracted. With his thin lips, his cold smile, and his remorseless, deliberate, way of speaking, he always seemed to be secretly gloating over the hideous scene in the hall of Fotheringay, or the last agonies of a disembowelled Papist. Lord Acton was, or seemed to be, a man of the world first and foremost; a politician and a lover of society; a gossip, and, as his "Letters" show, not always a friendly gossip.[52] His demeanour was profoundly sphinx-like, and he seemed to enjoy the sense that his hearers were anxious to learn what he was able but unwilling to impart. His knowledge and accomplishments it would, at this time of day, be ridiculous to question; and on the main concerns of human life--Religion and Freedom--I was entirely at one with him. All the more do I regret that in society he so effectually concealed his higher enthusiasms, and that, having lived on the vague fame of his "History of Liberty," he died leaving it unwritten.

I am writing of the years when I first knew London socially, and I may extend them from 1876 to 1886. All through those years, as through many before and since, the best representative of culture in society was Mr., now Sir, George Trevelyan--a poet, a scholar to his finger-tips, an enthusiast for all that is best in literature, ancient or modern, and author of one of the six great Biographies in the English language.

There is no need to recapitulate Sir George's services to the State, or to criticize his performances in literature. It is enough to record my lively and lasting grat.i.tude for the unbroken kindness which began when I was a boy at Harrow, and continues to the present hour.

I have spoken, so far, of literary men who played a more or less conspicuous part in society; but, as this chapter is dedicated to Literature, I ought to say a word about one or two men of Letters who always avoided society, but who, when one sought them out in their own surroundings, were delightful company. Foremost among these I should place James Payn.

Payn was a man who lived in, for, and by Literature. He detested exercise. He never travelled. He scarcely ever left London. He took no holidays. If he was forced into the country for a day or two, he used the exile as material for a story or an essay. His life was one incessant round of literary activity. He had published his first book while he was an Undergraduate at Trinity, and from first to last he wrote more than a hundred volumes. _By Proxy_ has been justly admired for the wonderful accuracy of its local colour, and for a masterly knowledge of Chinese character; but the writer drew exclusively from encyclopaedias and books of travel. In my judgment, he was at his best in the Short Story. He practised that difficult art long before it became popular, and a book called originally _People, Places, and Things_, but now _Humorous Stories_, is a masterpiece of fun, invention, and observation. In 1874, he became "Reader" to Messrs. Smith and Elder, and in that capacity had the happiness of discovering _Vice Versa_, and the less felicitous experience of rejecting _John Inglesant_ as unreadable.

It was at this period of his life that I first encountered Payn, and I fell at once under his charm. His was not a faultless character, for he was irritable, petulant, and prejudiced. He took the strongest dislikes, sometimes on very slight grounds; was unrestrained in expressing them, and was apt to treat opinions which he did not share very cavalierly.

But none of these faults could obscure his charm. He was the most tender-hearted of human beings, and the sight, even the thought, of cruelty set his blood on fire. But, though he was intensely humane, he was absolutely free from mawkishness; and a wife-beater, or a child-torturer, or a cattle-maimer would have had short shrift at his hands. He was genuinely sympathetic, especially towards the hopes and struggles of the young and the unbefriended. Many an author, once struggling but now triumphant, could attest this trait. But his chief charm was his humour. It was absolutely natural; bubbled like a fountain, and danced like light. Nothing escaped it, and solemnity only stimulated it to further activities. He had the power, which Sydney Smith described, of "abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule;" and, when he was offended, the ridicule had a remarkably sharp point. It was of course, impossible that all the humour of a man who joked incessantly could be equally good. Sometimes it was rather boyish, playing on proper names or personal peculiarities; and sometimes it descended to puns. But, for sheer rapidity, I have never known Payn's equal. When a casual word annoyed him, his repartee flashed out like lightning. I could give plenty of instances, but to make them intelligible I should have to give a considerable amount of introduction, and that would entirely spoil the sense of flas.h.i.+ng rapidity. There was no appreciable interval of time between the provoking word and the repartee which it provoked.

Another great element of charm in Payn was his warm love of Life,

"And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world."

While he hated the black and savage and sordid side of existence with a pa.s.sionate hatred, he enjoyed all its better--which he believed to be its larger--part with an infectious relish. Never have I known a more blithe and friendly spirit; never a nature to which Literature and Society--books and men--yielded a more constant and exhilarating joy. He had unstinted admiration for the performances of others, and was wholly free from jealousy. His temperament indeed was not equable. He had ups and downs, bright moods and dark, seasons of exaltation and seasons of depression. The one succeeded the other with startling rapidity, but the bright moods triumphed, and it was impossible to keep him permanently depressed. His health had always been delicate, but illness neither crushed his spirit nor paralysed his pen. Once he broke a blood-vessel in the street, and was conveyed home in an ambulance. During the transit, though he was in some danger of bleeding to death, he began to compose a narrative of his adventure, and next week it appeared in the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_.

During the last two years of his life he was painfully crippled by arthritic rheumatism, and could no longer visit the Reform Club, where for many years he had every day eaten his luncheon and played his rubber. Determining that he should not completely lose his favourite, or I should rather say his only, amus.e.m.e.nt, some members of the Club banded themselves together to supply him with a rubber in his own house twice a week; and this practice was maintained to his death. It was a striking testimony to the affection which he inspired. In those years I was a pretty frequent visitor, and, on my way to the house, I used to bethink me of stories which might amuse him, and I used even to note them down between one visit and another, as a provision for next time. One day Payn said, "A collection of your stories would make a book, and I think Smith and Elder would publish it." I thought my anecdotage scarcely worthy of so much honour; but I promised to make a weekly experiment in the _Manchester Guardian_. My _Collections and Recollections_ ran through the year 1897, and appeared in book-form at Easter, 1898. But Payn died on the 25th of the previous March; and the book, which I had hoped to put in his hand, I could only inscribe to his delightful memory.

Another remarkable man of letters, wholly remote from the world, was Richard Holt Hutton, for thirty-six years (1861-1897) the honoured Editor of _The Spectator_. Hutton was a "stickit minister" of the Unitarian persuasion, who had been led, mainly by the teaching of F. D.

Maurice, to the acceptance of orthodox Christianity; and who devoted all the rest of his life to the inculcation of what he conceived to be moral and religious truth, through the medium of a weekly review. He lived, a kind of married hermit, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and could hardly be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved _Spectator_.

His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of the man--tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives"

and acc.u.mulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "_The Spectator_," wrote Matthew Arnold in 1865, "is all very well, but the article has Hutton's fault of seeing so very far into a mill-stone." And, two years later, "_The Spectator_ has an article in which Hutton shows his strange apt.i.tude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." Both were sound criticisms. When Hutton addressed himself to a deep topic of abstract speculation, he "saw so very far into it" that even his most earnest admirers could not follow the visual act. When he handled the more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the abstract and the mystical--a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on such a theme as Personal Ident.i.ty or the Idea of G.o.d, he "found no end, in wandering mazes lost."