architectural, and archaeological knowledge; and made mullion and portcullis, and armour and tapestry the pegs for a series of neat discourses on mediaeval history, domestic decoration, and the science of fortification.
Which things are an allegory. We, as a nation, take this calm assurance of foreigners at its own valuation. We consent to be told that we do not know our own poets, cannot pronounce our own language, and have no well-educated women. But after a time this process palls. We question the divine right of the superiority thus imposed on us. We ask on what foundation these high claims rest, and we discover all at once that we have paid a great deal of deference where very little was deserved. By processes such as these I came to find, in years long subsequent to the encounter at Durham, that Mr. Lowell, though an accomplished politician, a brilliant writer, and an admirable after-dinner speaker, was, conversationally considered, an inaccurate man with an accurate manner. But, after all, inaccuracy is by no means the worst of conversational faults, and when he was in the vein Mr. Lowell could be exceedingly good company. He liked talking, and talked not only much but very well. He had a genuine vein of wit and great dexterity in phrase-making; and on due occasion would produce from the rich stores of his own experience some of the most vivid and striking incidents, both civil and military, of that tremendous struggle for human freedom with which his name and fame must be always and most honourably associated.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] April 15 1888
[16] Written in 1897.
XIV.
CONVERSATION–_continued_.
Brave men have lived since as well as before Agamemnon, and those who know the present society of London may not unreasonably ask whether, even granting the heavy losses which I enumerated in my last chapter, the Art of Conversation is really extinct. Are the talkers of to-day in truth so immeasurably inferior to the great men who preceded them? Before we can answer these questions, even tentatively, we must try to define our idea of good conversation, and this can best be done by rigidly ruling out what is bad. To begin with, all affectation, unreality, and straining aftereffect are intolerable; scarcely less so are rhetoric, declamation, and whatever tends towards speech-making. Mimicry is a very dangerous trick, rare in perfection, and contemptible when imperfect. An apt story well told is delicious, but there was sound philosophy in Mr. Pinto’s view that “when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.” One touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin, and a spice of malice tickles the intellectual palate; but a conversation which is mainly malicious is entirely dull. Constant joking is a weariness to the flesh; but, on the other hand, a sustained seriousness of discourse is fatally apt to recall the conversation between the Hon. Elijah Pogram and the Three Literary Ladies–“How Pogram got out of his depth instantly, and how the Three L.L.’s were never in theirs, is a piece of history not worth recording. Suffice it that, being all four out of their depths and all unable to swim, they splashed up words in all directions, and floundered about famously. On the whole, it was considered to have been the severest mental exercise ever heard in the National Hotel, and the whole company observed that their heads ached with the effort–as well they might.”
A talker who monopolizes the conversation is by common consent insufferable, and a man who regulates his choice of topics by reference to what interests not his hearers but himself has yet to learn the alphabet of the art. Conversation is like lawn-tennis, and requires alacrity in return at least as much as vigour in service. A happy phrase, an unexpected collocation of words, a habitual precision in the choice of terms, are rare and shining ornaments of conversation, but they do not for an instant supply the place of lively and interesting matter, and an excessive care for them is apt to tell unfavourably on the substance of discourse.
“I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence that must have been very much astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others apparently could so well have expressed his idea. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post–every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flung out into every burst.” This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield’s conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame. Though written in admiration, it seems to me to describe the most intolerable performance that could ever have afflicted society. _He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post_. Could the wit of man devise a more appalling image?
Mr. Matthew Arnold once said to me: “People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” This dictum applies, I think, at least as well to conversation as to literature. The one thing needful is to have something to say. The way of saying it may best be left to take care of itself. A young man about town once remarked to me, in the tone of one who utters an accepted truism: “It is so much more interesting to talk about people than things.” The sentiment was highly characteristic of the mental calibre and associations of the speaker; and certainly the habitual talk–for it is not conversation–of that section of society which calls itself “smart” seems to touch the lowest depth of spiteful and sordid dullness. But still, when the mischiefs of habitual personality have been admitted to the uttermost, there remains something to be said on the other side. We are not inhabitants of Jupiter or Saturn, but human beings to whom nothing that is human is wholly alien. And if in the pursuit of high abstractions and improving themes we imitate too closely Wordsworth’s avoidance of Personal Talk, our dinner-table will run much risk of becoming as dull as that poet’s own fireside.
Granting, then, that to have something to say which is worth hearing is the substance of good conversation, we must reckon among its accidents and ornaments a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; a habitual deference to the tastes and even the prejudices of other people; a hearty desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a constant recollection that even the most patient hearers may sometimes wish to be speakers. Above all else, the agreeable talker cultivates gentleness and delicacy of speech, avoids aggressive and overwhelming displays, and remembers the tortured cry of the neurotic bard:–
“Vociferated logic kills me quite;
A noisy man is always in the right– I twirl my thumbs, fall back into my chair, Fix on the wainscot a distressful stare; And when I hope his blunders all are out, Reply discreetly, ‘To be sure–no doubt!'”
If these, or something like these, are the attributes of good conversation, in whom do we find them best exemplified? Who best understands the Art of Conversation? Who, in a word, are our best talkers? I hope that I shall not be considered ungallant if I say nothing about the part borne in conversation by ladies. Really it is a sacred awe that makes me mute. London is happy in possessing not a few hostesses, excellently accomplished, and not more accomplished than gracious, of whom it is no flattery to say that to know them is a liberal education. But, as Lord Beaconsfield observes in a more than usually grotesque passage of _Lothair_, “We must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea.” We will not “peep and botanize” on sacred soil, nor submit our most refined delights to the impertinences of critical analysis.
In considering the Art of Conversation I obey a natural instinct when I think first of Mr. Charles Villiers, M.P. His venerable age alone would entitle him to this pre-eminence, for he was born in 1802, and was for seventy years one of the best talkers in London. Born of a family which combined high rank with intellectual distinction, his parentage was a passport to all that was best in social and political life. It argues no political bias to maintain that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century Toryism afforded its neophytes no educational opportunities equal to those which a young Whig enjoyed at Bowood and Panshanger and Holland House. There the best traditions of the previous century were constantly reinforced by accessions of fresh intellect. The charmed circle was indeed essentially, but it was not exclusively, aristocratic; genius held the key, and there was a _carriere ouverte aux talents_.
Thus it came to pass that the society of Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland and Lord Melbourne was also the society of Brougham and Mackintosh, and Macaulay and Sydney Smith. It presented every variety of accomplishment and experience and social charm, and offered to a man beginning life the best conceivable education in the art of making oneself agreeable. For that art Mr. Villiers had a natural genius, and his lifelong association with the Whigs superadded a technical training in it. But this, though much, was by no means all. I hold it to be an axiom that a man who is only a member of society can never be so agreeable as one who is something else as well. And Mr. Villiers, though “a man about town,” a story-teller, and a diner-out of high renown, has had seventy years’ experience of practical business and Parliamentary life. Thus the resources of his knowledge have been perpetually enlarged, and, learning much, he has forgotten nothing. The stores of his memory are full of treasures new and old. He has taken part in the making of history, and can estimate the great men of the present day by a comparison with the political immortals.
That this comparison is not always favourable to some exalted reputations of the present hour is indeed sufficiently notorious to all who have the pleasure of Mr. Villiers’s acquaintance; and nowhere is his mastery of the art of conversation more conspicuous than in his knack of implying dislike and insinuating contempt without crude abuse or noisy denunciation. He has a delicate sense of fun, a keen eye for incongruities and absurdities, and that genuine cynicism which springs, not from the poor desire to be thought worldly-wise, but from a lifelong acquaintance with the foibles of political men. To these gifts must be added a voice which age has not robbed of its sympathetic qualities, a style of diction and a habit of pronunciation which belong to the eighteenth century, and that formal yet facile courtesy which no one less than eighty years old seems capable of even imitating.
I have instanced Mr. Villiers as an eminent talker. I now turn to an eminent man who talks–Mr. Gladstone.[17] An absurd story has long been current among credulous people with rampant prejudices that Mr. Gladstone was habitually uncivil to the Queen. Now, it happens that Mr. Gladstone is the most courteous of mankind. His courtesy is one of his most engaging gifts, and accounts in no small degree for his power of attracting the regard of young men and undistinguished people generally. To all such he is polite to the point of deference, yet never condescending. His manners to all alike–young and old, rich and poor–are the ceremonious manners of the old school, and his demeanour towards ladies is a model of chivalrous propriety. It would therefore have been to the last degree improbable that he should make a departure from his usual habits in the case of a lady who was also his Sovereign. And, as a matter of fact, the story is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it deserves mention only because, in itself false, it is founded on a truth. “I,” said the Duke of Wellington on a memorable occasion, “have no small talk, and Peel has no manners.” Mr. Gladstone has manners but no small talk. He is so consumed by zeal for great subjects that he leaves out of account the possibility that they may not interest other people. He pays to every one, and not least to ladies, the compliment of assuming that they are on his own intellectual level, engrossed in the subjects which engross him, and furnished with at least as much information as will enable them to follow and to understand him. Hence the genesis of that absurd story about his demeanour to the Queen.
“He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting,” is a complaint which is said to have proceeded from illustrious lips. That most successful of all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of German princes. Mr. Gladstone harangues her about the polity of the Hittites, or the harmony between the Athanasian Creed and Homer. The Queen, perplexed and uncomfortable, tries to make a digression–addresses a remark to a daughter or proffers biscuit to a begging terrier. Mr. Gladstone restrains himself with an effort till the Princess has answered or the dog has sat down, and then promptly resumes: “I was about to say–” Meanwhile the flood has gathered force by delay, and when it bursts forth again it carries all before it.
No image except that of a flood can convey the notion of Mr. Gladstone’s table-talk on a subject which interests him keenly–its rapidity, its volume, its splash and dash, its frequent beauty, its striking effects, the amount of varied matter which it brings with it, the hopelessness of trying to withstand it, the unexpectedness of its onrush, the subdued but fertilized condition of the subjected area over which it has passed. The bare mention of a topic which interests Mr. Gladstone opens the floodgates and submerges a province. But the torrent does not wait for the invitation. If not invited it comes of its own accord; headlong, overwhelming, sweeping all before it, and gathering fresh force from every obstacle which it encounters on its course. Such is Mr. Gladstone’s table-talk. For conversation, strictly so called, he has no turn. He asks questions when he wants information, and answers them copiously when asked by others. But of give-and-take, of meeting you half-way, of paying you back in your own conversational coin, he has little notion. He discourses, he lectures, he harangues. But if a subject is started which does not interest him it falls flat. He makes no attempt to return the ball. Although, when he is amused, his amusement is intense and long sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious. It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man’s fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point upon some trait of baseness, cynicism, or sharp practice. He finds his tale received in dead silence, looks up wonderingly for an explanation, and finds that what was intended to amuse has only disgusted. Mr. Browning once told Mr. Gladstone a highly characteristic story of Disraelitish duplicity, and for all reply heard a voice choked with indignation:–“Do you call that amusing, Browning? _I call it devilish_.”[18]
FOOTNOTES:
[17] This was written before the 19th of May, 1898, on which day “the world lost its greatest citizen;” but it has not been thought necessary, here or elsewhere, to change the present into the past tense.
[18] I give this story as I received it from Mr. Browning.
XV.
CONVERSATION–_continued_.
More than thirty years have passed since the festive evening described by Sir George Trevelyan in _The Ladies in Parliament_:–
“When, over the port of the innermost bin, The circle of diners was laughing with Phinn; When Brookfield had hit on his happiest vein. And Harcourt was capping the jokes of Delane.”
The sole survivor of that brilliant group now[19] leads the Opposition; but at the time when the lines were written he had not yet entered the House of Commons. As a youth of twenty-five he had astonished the political world by his anonymous letters on _The Morality of Public Men_, in which he denounced, in the style of Junius, the Protectionist revival of 1852. He had fought a plucky but unsuccessful fight at Kirkcaldy; was making his five thousand a year at the Parliamentary Bar; had taught the world international law over the signature of “Historicus,” and was already, what he is still, one of the most conspicuous and interesting figures in the society of London. Of Sir William Harcourt’s political alliances this is not the place nor am I the person to treat:
“Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of Man.”
My theme is not Sir William Harcourt the politician, but Sir William Harcourt the man, the member of society–above all, the talker. And, although I have thus deliberately put politics on one side, it is strictly relevant to my purpose to observe that Sir William is essentially and typically a Whig. For Whiggery, rightly understood, is not a political creed but a social caste. The Whig, like the poet, is born, not made. It is as difficult to become a Whig as to become a Jew. Macaulay was probably the only man who, being born outside the privileged enclosure, ever penetrated to its heart and assimilated its spirit. The Whigs, indeed, as a body have held certain opinions and pursued certain tactics which have been analyzed in chapters xix. and xxi. of the unexpurgated _Book of Snobs_. But those opinions and those tactics have been mere accidents, though perhaps inseparable accidents, of Whiggery. Its substance has been relationship.
When Lord John Russell formed his first Administration his opponents alleged that it was mainly composed of his cousins, and one of his younger brothers was charged with the impossible task of rebutting the accusation in a public speech. Mr. Beresford-Hope, in one of his novels, made excellent fun of what he called “the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood.” He showed–what, indeed, the Whigs themselves knew uncommonly well–that from a certain Earl Gower, who flourished in the eighteenth century, and was great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, are descended all the Levesons,[20] Gowers, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Russells, and Harcourts, who walk on the face of the earth. Truly a noble and a highly favoured progeny. “They _are_ our superiors,” said Thackeray; “and that’s the fact. I am not a Whig myself (perhaps it is as unnecessary to say so as to say I’m not King Pippin in a golden coach, or King Hudson, or Miss Burdett-Coutts). I’m not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!”
From this illustrious stock Sir William Harcourt is descended through his grandmother, Lady Anne Harcourt–born Leveson-Gower, and wife of the last Prince-Archbishop of York (whom, by the way, Sir William strikingly resembles both in figure and in feature). When one meets Sir William Harcourt for the first time in society, perhaps one is first struck by the fact that he is in aspect and bearing a great gentleman of the old school, and then that he is an admirable talker. He is a true Whig in culture as well as in blood. Though his conversation is never pedantic, it rests on a wide and strong basis of generous learning. Even those who most cordially admire his political ability do not always remember that he is an excellent scholar, and graduated as eighth in the First Class of the Classical Tripos in the year when Bishop Lightfoot was Senior Classic. He has the _Corpus Poetarum_ and Shakespeare and Pope at his finger-ends, and his intimate acquaintance with the political history of England elicited a characteristic compliment from Lord Beaconsfield. It is his favourite boast that in all his tastes, sentiments, and mental habits he belongs to the eighteenth century, which he glorifies as the golden age of reason, patriotism, and liberal learning. This self-estimate strikes me as perfectly sound, and it requires a very slight effort of the imagination to conceive this well-born young Templar wielding his doughty pen in the Bangorian Controversy, or declaiming on the hustings for Wilkes and Liberty; bandying witticisms with Sheridan, and capping Latin verses with Charles Fox; or helping to rule England as a member of that “Venetian Oligarchy” on which Lord Beaconsfield lavished all the vials of his sarcasm. In truth, it is not fanciful to say that whatever was best in the eighteenth century–its robust common sense, its racy humour, its thorough and unaffected learning, its ceremonious courtesy for great occasions, its jolly self-abandonment in social intercourse–is exhibited in the demeanour and conversation of Sir William Harcourt. He is an admirable host, and, to borrow a phrase from Sydney Smith, “receives his friends with that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine.” As a guest, he is a splendid acquisition, always ready to amuse and to be amused, delighting in the rapid cut-and-thrust of personal banter, and bringing out of his treasure things new and old for the amusement and the benefit of a later and less instructed generation.
Extracts from the private conversation of living people, as a rule, I forbear; but some of Sir William’s quotations are so extraordinarily apt that they deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk. That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens’s Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, “This reminds me of Addison’s evening hymn–
‘And Knightley to the listening earth Repeats the story of his birth.'”
Surely the force of apt citation can no further go. When Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt’s hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day, Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line–
“The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.”
Some historians say that he substituted “bards” for “birds,” and the reception accorded by the poet to the parody was not as cordial as its excellence deserved.
Another capital talker is Sir George Trevelyan. He has been, from the necessities of his position, a man of the world and a politician, and he is as ready as Mr. Bertie-Tremaine’s guests in _Endymion_ to talk of “that heinous subject on which enormous fibs are ever told–the Registration.” But, after all, the man of the world and the politician are only respectable parts which he had been bound to assume, and he has played them–with assiduity and success: but the true man in Sir George Trevelyan is the man of letters. Whenever he touches a historical or literary theme his whole being seems to undergo a transformation. The real nature flashes out through his twinkling eyes. While he muses the fire burns, and, like the Psalmist, he speaks with his tongue. Dates and details, facts and traditions, cantos and poetry, reams of prose, English and Latin and Greek and French, come tumbling out in headlong but not disorderly array. He jumps at an opening, seizes an illusion, replies with lightning quickness to a conversational challenge, and is ready at a moment’s notice to decide any literary or historical controversy in a measured tone of deliberate emphasis which is not wholly free from exaggeration. Like his uncle Lord Macaulay, Sir George Trevelyan has “his own heightened and telling way of putting things,” and those who know him well make allowance for this habit. For the rest, he is delightful company, light-hearted as a boy, full of autobiographical chit-chat about Harrow and Trinity, and India and Holly Lodge, eagerly interested in his friends’ concerns, brimming over with enthusiasm, never bored, never flat, never stale. A well-concerted party is a kind of unconscious conspiracy to promote cheerfulness and enjoyment, and in such an undertaking there can be no more serviceable ally than Sir George Trevelyan.
Mr. John Morley’s agreeableness in conversation is of a different kind. His leading characteristic is a dignified austerity of demeanour which repels familiarity and tends to keep conversation on a high level; but each time one meets him there is less formality and less restraint, and the grave courtesy which never fails is soon touched with friendliness and frank good-humour in a singularly attractive fashion. He talks, not much, but remarkably well. His sentences are deliberate, clear-cut, often eloquent. He excels in phrase-making. His quotations are apt and novel. His fine taste and varied reading enable him to hold his own in many fields where the merely professional politician is apt to be terribly astray. His kindness to social and literary beginners is one of his most engaging traits. He invariably finds something pleasant to say about the most immature and unpromising efforts, and he has the knack of so handling his own early experience as to make it an encouragement and a stimulus, and not (as the manner of some is) a burden and a bogey. Mr. Morley never obtrudes his own opinions, never introduces debatable matter, never dogmatizes. But he is always ready to pick up the gauntlet, especially if a Tory flings it down; is merciless towards ill-formed assertion, and is the alert and unsparing enemy of what Mr. Ruskin calls “the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial.”
Lord Salisbury goes so little into general society that his qualities as a talker are not familiarly known. He is painfully shy, and at a club or in a large party undergoes the torments of the lost. Yet no one can listen, even casually, to his conversation without appreciating the fine manner, full both of dignity and of courtesy; the utter freedom from pomposity, formality, and self-assertion, and the agreeable dash of genuine cynicism, which modifies, though it does not mask, the flavour of his fun. After a visit to Hatfield in 1868, Bishop Wilberforce wrote in his diary: “Gladstone how struck with Salisbury: ‘Never saw a more perfect host.'” And again–“He remarked to me on the great power of charming and pleasant hosting possessed by Salisbury.” And it is the universal testimony of Lord Salisbury’s guests, whether at Hatfield or in Arlington Street, that he is seen at his very best in his own house. The combination of such genuine amiability in private life with such calculated brutality in public utterance constitutes a psychological problem which might profitably be made the subject of a Romanes Lecture.
Barring the shyness, from which Mr. Balfour is conspicuously free, there is something of Lord Salisbury’s social manner about his accomplished nephew. He has the same courtesy, the same sense of humour, the same freedom from official solemnity. But the characteristics of the elder man are exaggerated in the younger. The cynicism which is natural in Lord Salisbury is affected in Mr. Balfour. He cultivates the art of indifference, and gives himself the airs of a jaded Epicurean who craves only for a new sensation. There is what an Irish Member, in a moment of inspiration, called a “toploftiness” about his social demeanour which is not a little irritating. He is too anxious to show that he is not as other men are. Among politicians he is a philosopher; among philosophers, a politician. Before that hard-bitten crew whom Burke ridiculed–the “calculators and economists”–he will talk airily of golf and ladies’ fashions; and ladies he will seek to impress by the Praise of Vivisection or the Defence of Philosophic Doubt. His social agreeableness has, indeed, been marred by the fatuous idolatry of a fashionable clique, stimulating the self-consciousness which was his natural foible; but when he can for a moment forget himself he still is excellent company, for he is genuinely amiable and thoroughly well informed.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] 1897.
[20] Cromartie, 4th Duke.
XVI.
CONVERSATION–_continued_.
The writer of these chapters has always felt some inward affinity to the character of Lord St. Jerome in _Lothair_, of whom it is recorded that he loved conversation, though he never conversed. “There must be an audience,” he would say, “and I am the audience.” In my capacity of audience I assign a high place to the agreeableness of Lord Rosebery’s conversation. To begin with, he has a delightful voice. It is low, but perfectly distinct, rich and sympathetic in quality, and singularly refined in accent. It is exactly the sort of voice which bespeaks the goodwill of the hearer and recommends what it utters. In a former chapter we agreed that the chief requisite of good conversation is to have something to say which is worth saying, and here Lord Rosebery is excellently equipped. Last week the newspapers announced with a flourish of rhetorical trumpets that he had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday.[21] Some of the trumpeters, with a laudable intention to be civil, cried, “Is it possible that he can be so old?” Others, with subtler art, professed themselves unable to believe that he was so young. Each compliment contained its element of truth. In appearance, air, and tastes Lord Rosebery is still young. In experience, knowledge, and conduct he is already old. He has had a vivid and a varied experience. He is equally at home on Epsom Downs and in the House of Lords. His life has been full of action, incident, and interest. He has not only collected books, but has read them; and has found time, even amid the engrossing demands of the London County Council, the Turf, and the Foreign Office, not only for study, but–what is much more remarkable–for thought.
So far, then, as substance goes, his conversation is (to use Mr. Gladstone’s quaint phrase) “as full of infinitely varied matter as an egg is full of meat;” and in its accidents and ornaments it complies exactly with the conditions laid down in a former chapter–a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; habitual deference to the tastes and prejudices of other people; a courteous desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a recollection that even the most patient hearers (among whom the present writer reckons himself) may sometimes wish to be speakers. To these gifts he adds a keen sense of humour, a habit of close observation, and a sub-acid vein of sarcasm which resembles the dash of Tarragon in a successful salad. In a word, Lord Rosebery is one of the most agreeable talkers of the day; and even if it is true that _il s’ecoute quand il parle_, his friends may reply that it would be strange indeed if one could help listening to what is always so agreeable and often so brilliant.
A genial journalist recently said that Mr. Goschen was now chiefly remembered by the fact that he had once had Sir Alfred Milner for his Private Secretary. But whatever may be thought of the First Lord of the Admiralty as a politician and an administrator, I claim for him a high place among agreeable talkers. There are some men who habitually use the same style of speech in public and in private life. Happily for his friends, this is not the case with Mr. Goschen. Nothing can be less agreeable than his public style, whether on the platform or in the House of Commons. Its tawdry staginess, its “Sadler’s Wells sarcasm,” its constant striving after strong effects, are distressing to good taste. But in private life he is another and a much more agreeable man. He is courteous, genial, perfectly free from affectation, and enters into the discussion of social banalities as eagerly and as brightly as if he had never converted the Three per Cents, or established the ratio between dead millionaires and new ironclads. His easiness in conversation is perhaps a little marred by a Teutonic tendency to excessive analysis which will not suffer him to rest until he has resolved every subject and almost every phrase into its primary elements. But this philosophic temperament has its counterbalancing advantages in a genuine openness of mind, willingness to weigh and measure opposing views, and inaccessibility to intellectual passion. It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle. Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group of intimate friends who drank ’34 port and conversed accordingly. Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpassed; and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, whose “sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos,” were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius. But this belongs to ancient history, and my business is with the conversation of to-day.
Very distinctly of to-day is the conversation of Mr. Labouchere. Even our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle. The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there, poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory, and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light of his genial philosophy. It is a chequered experience that has made him what he is. He has known men and cities; has probed in turn the mysteries of the caucus, the green-room, and the Stock Exchange; has been a diplomatist, a financier, a journalist, and a politician. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that his faith–no doubt originally robust–in the purity of human nature and the uprightness of human motive should have undergone some process of degeneration. Still it may be questioned whether, after all that he has seen and done, he is the absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable endeavour to make out the worst of every one–including himself–gives a certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant, and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore. He is by no means inclined to bow his knee too slavishly to an exalted reputation, and analyzes with agreeable frankness the personal and political qualities of great and good men, even if they sit on the front Opposition bench. As a contributor to enjoyment, as a promoter of fun, as an unmasker of political and social humbug, he is unsurpassed. His performances in debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only; but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell rings, when some eminent nonentity is declaiming his foregone conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of finding a disengaged cab in Palace Yard.
Like Mr. Labouchere, Lord Acton has touched life at many points–but not the same. He is a theologian, a professor, a man of letters, a member of society; and his conversation derives a distinct tinge from each of these environments. When, at intervals all too long, he quits his retirement at Cannes or Cambridge, and flits mysteriously across the social scene, his appearance is hailed with devout rejoicing by every one who appreciates manifold learning, a courtly manner, and a delicately sarcastic vein of humour. The distinguishing feature of Lord Acton’s conversation is an air of sphinx-like mystery, which suggests that he knows a great deal more than he is willing to impart. Partly by what he says, and even more by what he leaves unsaid, his hearers are made to feel that, if he has not acted conspicuous parts, he has been behind the scenes of many and very different theatres.
He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany, and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days, have drawn official Liberalism into their folds. He has long lived on terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden. But he is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he flits from Lady Hayter’s tea-table to Mr. Goschen’s bureau, analyzes at the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks’s, and by dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.
The ranks of our good talkers–none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter–have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell. For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine–in short, since he entered Parliament–that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before that time his delightful _Obiter Dicta_ had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect. To “birrell” is now a verb as firmly established as to “boycott,” and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.
An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” and the collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be amused, the epithet “harmonious” is abundantly justified. He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means, and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too “cultured” to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] May 7, 1897.
XVII.
CLERGYMEN.
_ Clerus Anglicanus stupor mundi_. I believe that this complimentary proverb originally referred to the learning of the English clergy, but it would apply with equal truth to their social agreeableness. When I was writing about the Art of Conversation and the men who excelled in it, I was surprised to find how many of the best sayings that recurred spontaneously to my memory had a clerical origin; and it struck me that a not uninteresting chapter might be written about the social agreeableness of clergymen. A mere layman may well feel a natural and becoming diffidence in venturing to handle so high a theme.
In a former chapter I said something of the secular magnificence which surrounded great prelates in the good old days, when the Archbishop of Canterbury could only be approached on gilt-edged paper, and even the Bishop of impecunious Oxford never appeared in his Cathedral city without four horses and two powdered footmen. In a certain sense, no doubt, these splendid products of established religion conduced to social agreeableness. Like the excellent prelate described in _Friendship’s Garland_, they “had thoroughly learnt the divine lesson that charity begins at home.” They maintained an abundant hospitality; they celebrated domestic events by balls at the episcopal palace; they did not disdain (as we gather from the Life of the Hon. and Rev. George Spencer) the relaxation of a rubber of whist, even on the night before an Ordination, with a candidate for a partner. They dined out, like that well-drawn bishop in _Little Dorrit_, who “was crisp, fresh, cheerful, affable, bland, but so surprisingly innocent;” or like the prelate on whom Thackeray moralized: “My Lord, I was pleased to see good thing after good thing disappear before you; and think that no man ever better became that rounded episcopal apron. How amiable he was! how kind! He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Establishment.”
But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal agreeableness. We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends entirely on the topic of the merriment. A clergyman who made light of the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common consent be intolerable. Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the “merriment of parsons” when it plays round subjects outside the scope of their professional duties.
Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that “he never, except once, knew him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;” and I regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment–rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was–subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson.
_Peter Plymley’s Letters_, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton, the Essays on _America_ and _Persecuting Bishops_, will probably be read as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay’s review of Montgomery’s Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes–pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb–an incredible number of those which are current in daily converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon.
When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I think, have struck every reader of the Bishop’s Life, whether in the three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and good stories collected from other people are all that the books disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time. We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in _Lothair_, and on the principle of _Ce n’est que la verite qui blesse_, it may be worth while to recall it: “The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his angelic jokes were well launched.”
Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, “If I was paid what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;” and, waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do with Bishop Wilberforce’s exuberant and infectious jollity. “A truly emotional spirit,” wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country house, “he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other.”
A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley. A clergyman to whom the Queen signed herself “Ever yours affectionately” must certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every circumstance of Stanley’s nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for the part. He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys. He was born of famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of well-deserved promotion to the most delightful of all offices in the Church of England. His inward nature accorded well with this happy environment. It was in a singular degree pure, simple, refined, ingenuous. All the grosser and harsher elements of human character seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his “picturesque sensibility,” and the phrase was happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified by something of the poet’s imagination. His conversation was incessant, teeming with information, and illustrated by familiar acquaintance with all the best that has been thought and said in the world.
Never was a brighter intellect or a more gallant heart housed in a more fragile form. His figure, features, bearing, and accent were the very type of refinement; and as the spare figure, so short yet so full of dignity, marked out by the decanal dress and the red ribbon of the Order of the Bath, threaded its way through the crowded saloons of London society, one felt that the Church, as a civilizing institution, could not be more appropriately represented.
A lady of Presbyterian antecedents who had conformed to Anglicanism once said to the present writer, “I dislike the _Episcopal_ Church as much as ever, but I love the _Decanal_ Church.” Her warmest admiration was reserved for that particular Dean, supreme alike in station and in charm, whom I have just now been describing; but there were, at the time of speaking, several other members of the same order who were conspicuous ornaments of the society in which they moved. There was Dr. Elliot, Dean of Bristol, a yearly visitor to London; dignified, clever, agreeable, highly connected; an administrator, a politician, an admirable talker; and so little trammelled by any ecclesiastical prejudices or habitudes that he might have been the original of Dr. Stanhope in _Barchester Towers_. There was Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, whose periodical appearances at Court and in society displayed to the admiring gaze of the world the very handsomest and stateliest specimen of the old English gentleman that our time has produced. There was Dr. Church, Dean of St. Paul’s, by many competent judges pronounced to be our most accomplished man of letters, yet so modest and so retiring that the world was never suffered to come in contact with him except through his books. And there was Dr. Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff, who concealed under the blandest of manners a remorseless sarcasm and a mordant wit, and who, returning from the comparative publicity of the Athenaeum to the domestic shades of the Temple, would often leave behind him some pungent sentence which travelled from mouth to mouth, and spared neither age nor sex nor friendship nor affinity.
The very highest dignitaries of the Church in London have never, in my experience, contributed very largely to its social life. The garden-parties of Fulham and Lambeth are indeed recognized incidents of the London season; but they present to the critical eye less the aspect of a social gathering than that of a Church Congress combined with a Mothers’ Meeting. The overwhelming disparity between the position of host and guests is painfully apparent, and that “drop-down-dead-ativeness” of manner which Sydney Smith quizzed still characterizes the demeanour of the unbeneficed clergy. Archbishop Tait, whose natural stateliness of aspect and manner was one of the most conspicuous qualifications for his great office, was a dignified and hospitable host; and Archbishop Thomson, reinforced by a beautiful and charming wife, was sometimes spoken of as the Archbishop of Society. Archbishop Benson looked the part to perfection, but did not take much share in general conversation, though I remember one terse saying of his in which the _odium theologicum_ supplied the place of wit. A portrait of Cardinal Manning was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and I remarked to the Archbishop on the extraordinary picturesqueness of the Cardinal’s appearance “The dress is very effective,” replied the Archbishop dryly, “but I don’t think there is much besides.” “Oh, surely it is a fine head?” “No, not a fine head; only _no face_.”
Passing down through the ranks of the hierarchy, I shall presently have something to say about two or three metropolitan Canons who are notable figures in society; but before I come to them I must offer a word of affectionate tribute to the memory of Dr. Liddon. Probably there never was a man whose social habit and manner were less like what a mere outsider would have inferred from his physical aspect and public demeanour. Nature had given him the outward semblance of a foreigner and an ascetic; a life-long study of ecclesiastical rhetoric had stamped him with a mannerism which belongs peculiarly to the pulpit. But the true inwardness of the man was that of the typical John Bull–hearty, natural, full of humour, utterly free from self-consciousness. He had a healthy appetite, and was not ashamed to gratify it; liked a good glass of wine; was peculiarly fond of sociable company, whether as host or guest; and told an amusing story with incomparable zest and point. His verbal felicity was a marked feature of his conversation. His description of Archbishop Benson (revived, with strange taste, by the _Saturday Review_ on the occasion of the Archbishop’s death) was a masterpiece of sarcastic character-drawing. The judicious Bishop Davidson and the accomplished Canon Mason were the subjects of similar pleasantries; and there was substantial truth as well as genuine fun in his letter to a friend written one dark Christmas from Amen Court: “London is just now buried under a dense fog. This is commonly attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at Westminster.”
XVIII.
CLERGYMEN–_continued_.
Of the “Merriment of Parsons” one of the most conspicuous instances was to be found in the Rev. W.H. Brookfield, the “little Frank Whitestock” of Thackeray’s _Curate’s Walk_, and the subject of Lord Tennyson’s characteristic elegy:–
“Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best– Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes, How oft we two have heard St. Mary’s chimes! How oft the Cantab supper host, and guest, Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!
* * * * *
You man of humorous-melancholy mark Dead of some inward agony–is it so?
Our kindlier, trustier Jaques, past away! I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark: [Greek: Skias onar]–dream of a shadow, go,– God bless you. I shall join you in a day.”
This tribute is as true in substance as it is striking in phrase. I have noticed the same peculiarity about Mr. Brookfield’s humour as about Jenny Lind’s singing. Those who had once heard it were always eager to talk about it. Ask some elderly man about the early triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale, and notice how he kindles. “Ah! Jenny Lind! Yes; there was never anything like that!” And he begins about the _Figlia_, and how she came along the bridge in the _Sonnambula_; and you feel the tenderness in his tone, as of a positive love for her whose voice seems still ringing through him as he talks. I have noticed exactly the same phenomenon when people who knew Mr. Brookfield hear his name mentioned in casual conversation. “Ah! Brookfield! Yes; there never was any one quite like him!” And off they go, with visible pleasure and genuine emotion, to describe the inimitable charm, the touch of genius which brought humorous delight out of the commonest incidents, the tinge of brooding melancholy which threw the flashing fun into such high relief.
Not soon will fade from the memory of any who ever heard it the history of the examination at the ladies’ school, where Brookfield, who had thought that he was only expected to examine in languages and literature, found himself required to set a paper in physical science. “What was I to do? I know nothing about hydrogen or oxygen or any other ‘gen.’ So I set them a paper in common sense, or what I called ‘Applied Science.’ One of my questions was, ‘What would you do to cure a cold in the head?’ One young lady answered, ‘I should put _my_ feet in hot mustard and water till _you_ were in a profuse perspiration.’ Another said, ‘I should put him to bed, give him a soothing drink, and sit by him till he was better.’ But, on reconsideration, she ran her pen through all the ‘him’s’ and ‘he’s,’ and substituted ‘her’ and ‘she.'”
Mr. Brookfield was during the greater part of his life a hard-working servant of the public, and his friends could only obtain his delightful company in the rare and scanty intervals of school-inspecting–a profession of which not even the leisure is leisurely. The type of the French abbe, whose sacerdotal avocations lay completely in the background and who could give the best hours of the day and night to the pleasures or duties of society, was best represented in our day by the Rev. William Harness and the Rev. Henry White. Mr. Harness was a diner-out of the first water; an author and a critic; perhaps the best Shakespearean scholar of his time; and a recognized and even dreaded authority on all matters connected with the art and literature of the drama. Mr. White, burdened only with the sinecure chaplaincies of the Savoy and the House of Commons, took the Theatre as his parish, mediated with the happiest tact between the Church and the Stage, and pronounced a genial benediction over the famous suppers in Stratton Street at which an enthusiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.
Canon Malcolm MacColl is an abbe with a difference. No one eats his dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make society a profession. He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England. The Franco-German War, the Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule, and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and _ex animo_ an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well. His inflexible integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the Priest in Politics. He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and has been behind the scenes of some historic performances. Yet he has never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of his sacred calling.
Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of _The Star Sapphire_, has drawn under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity, one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first conversation with William Wilberforce, she said: “I have always heard that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did not know that he was also the wittiest.” The agreeableness of the great philanthropist’s son–Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester–I discussed in my last chapter. We may put aside the fulsome dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be content to rest the Bishop’s reputation for agreeableness on testimony so little interested as that of Matthew Arnold and Archbishop Tait. The Archbishop wrote, after the Bishop’s death, of his “social and irresistibly fascinating side, as displayed in his dealings with society;” and in 1864 Mr. Arnold, after listening with only very moderate admiration to one of the Bishop’s celebrated sermons, wrote: “Where he was excellent was in his speeches at luncheon afterwards–gay, easy, cordial, and wonderfully happy.”
I think that one gathers from all dispassionate observers of the Bishop that what struck them most in him was the blending of boisterous fun and animal spirits with a deep and abiding sense of the seriousness of religion. In the philanthropist-father the religious seriousness rather preponderated over the fun; in the bishop-son (by a curious inversion of parts) the fun sometimes concealed the religiousness. To those who speculate in matters of race and pedigree it is interesting to watch the two elements contending in the character of Canon Basil Wilberforce, the Bishop’s youngest and best-beloved son. When you see his graceful figure and clean-shaven ecclesiastical face in the pulpit of his strangely old-fashioned church, or catch the vibrating notes of his beautifully modulated voice in
“The hush of our dread high altar,
Where The Abbey makes us _We_,”
you feel yourself in the presence of a born ecclesiastic, called from his cradle by an irresistible vocation to a separate and sanctified career. When you see him on the platform of some great public meeting, pouring forth argument, appeal, sarcasm, anecdote, fun, and pathos in a never-ceasing flood of vivid English, you feel that you are under the spell of a born orator. And yet again, when you see the priest of Sunday, the orator of Monday, presiding on Tuesday with easy yet finished courtesy at the hospitable table of the most beautiful dining-room in London, or welcomed with equal warmth for his racy humour and his unfailing sympathy in the homes of his countless friends, you feel that here is a man naturally framed for society, in whom his father and grandfather live again. Truly a combination of hereditary gifts is displayed in Canon Wilberforce; and the social agreeableness of London received a notable addition when Mr. Gladstone transferred him from Southampton to Dean’s Yard.
Of agreeable Canons there is no end, and the Chapter of Westminster is peculiarly rich in them. Mr. Gore’s ascetic saintliness of life conceals from the general world, but not from the privileged circle of his intimate friends, the high breeding of a great Whig family and the philosophy of Balliol. Archdeacon Furse has the refined scholarship and delicate literary sense which characterized Eton in its days of glory. Dr. Duckworth’s handsome presence has long been welcomed in the very highest of all social circles. Mr. Eyton’s massive bulk and warm heart, and rugged humour and sturdy common sense, produce the effect of a clerical Dr. Johnson. But perhaps we must turn our back on the Abbey and pursue our walk along the Thames Embankment as far as St. Paul’s if we want to discover the very finest flower of canonical culture and charm, for it blushes unseen in the shady recesses of Amen Court. Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul’s, is beyond all question one of the most agreeable men of his time. In fun and geniality and warm-hearted hospitality he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official house he inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds certain others which his admirable predecessor could scarcely have claimed. He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature, literature and life. His temperament is essentially musical, and, indeed, it was from him that I borrowed, in a former paragraph, my description of Jenny Lind and her effect on her hearers. No man in London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every class and stratum; and those friends acknowledge in him not only the most vivacious and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the moral forces which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift their lives.
Before I have done with the agreeableness of clergymen I must say a word about two academical personages, of whom it was not always easy to remember that they were clergymen, and whose agreeableness struck one in different lights, according as one happened to be the victim or the witness of their jocosity. If any one wishes to know what the late Master of Balliol was really like in his social aspect, I should refer him, not to the two volumes of his Biography, nor even to the amusing chit-chat of Mr. Lionel Tollemache’s Recollections, but to the cleverest work of a very clever Balliol man–Mr. W.H. Mallock’s _New Republic_. The description of Mr. Jowett’s appearance, conversation, and social bearing is photographic, and the sermon which Mr. Mallock puts into his mouth is not a parody, but an absolutely faultless reproduction both of substance and of style. That it excessively irritated the subject of the sketch is the best proof of its accuracy. For my own part, I must freely admit that I do not write as an admirer of Mr. Jowett; but one saying of his, which I had the advantage of hearing, does much to atone, in my judgment, for the snappish impertinences on which his reputation for wit has been generally based. The scene was the Master’s own dining-room, and the moment that the ladies had left the room one of the guests began a most outrageous conversation. Every one sat flabbergasted. The Master winced with annoyance; and then, bending down the table towards the offender, said in his shrillest tone–“Shall we continue this conversation in the drawing-room?” and rose from his chair. It was really a stroke of genius thus both to terminate and to rebuke the impropriety without violating the decorum due from host to guest.
Of the late Master of Trinity–Dr. Thompson–it was said: “He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who is able to abide his frost?” The stories of his mordant wit are endless, but an Oxford man can scarcely hope to narrate them with proper accuracy. He was nothing if not critical. At Seeley’s Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History his only remark was–“Well, well. I did not think we could so soon have had occasion to regret poor Kingsley.” To a gushing admirer who said that a popular preacher had so much taste–“Oh yes; so very much, and all so very bad.” Of a certain Dr. Woods, who wrote elementary mathematical books for schoolboys, and whose statue occupies the most conspicuous position in the ante-chapel of St. John’s College–“The Johnian Newton.” His hit at the present Chief Secretary for Ireland,[22] when he was a junior Fellow of Trinity, is classical–“We are none of us infallible–not even the youngest of us.” But it requires an eye-witness of the scene to do justice to the exordium of the Master’s sermon on the Parable of the Talents, addressed in Trinity Chapel to what considers itself, and not without justice, the cleverest congregation in the world. “It would be obviously superfluous in a congregation such as that which I now address to expatiate on the responsibilities of those who have five, or even two, talents. I shall therefore confine my observations to the more ordinary case of those of us who have _one talent_.”
FOOTNOTES:
[22] The Right Hon. G.W. Balfour.
XIX.
REPARTEE.
Lord Beaconsfield, describing Monsignore Berwick in _Lothair_, says that he “could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee.” The former performance is considerably easier than the latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory, and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The “sparkle” evaporates while the “anecdote” is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called “Anecdotage” is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means inclined to admit the general inferiority of contemporary conversation to that of the last generation, I am disposed to think that in the art of repartee our predecessors excelled us.
If this is true, it may be partly due to the greater freedom of an age when well-bred men and refined women spoke their minds with an uncompromising plainness which would now be voted intolerable. I have said that the old Royal Dukes were distinguished by the racy vigour of their conversation; and the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King Ernest of Hanover, was held to excel all his brothers in this respect. I was told by the late Sir Charles Wyke that he was once walking with the Duke of Cumberland along Piccadilly when the Duke of Gloucester (first cousin to Cumberland, and familiarly known as “Silly Billy”) came out of Gloucester House. “Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Gloucester, stop a minute. I want to speak to you,” roared the Duke of Cumberland. Poor Silly Billy, whom nobody ever noticed, was delighted to find himself thus accosted, and ambled up smiling. “Who’s your tailor?” shouted Cumberland. “Stultz,” replied Gloucester. “Thank you. I only wanted to know, because, whoever he is, he ought to be avoided like a pestilence.” Exit Silly Billy.
Of this inoffensive but not brilliant prince (who, by the way, was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) it is related that once at a levee he noticed a naval friend with a much-tanned face. “How do, Admiral? Glad to see you again. It’s a long time since you have been at a levee.” “Yes, sir. Since I last saw your Royal Highness I have been nearly to the North Pole.” “By G—, you look more as if you had been to the South Pole.” It is but bare justice to this depreciated memory to observe that the Duke of Gloucester scored a point against his kingly cousin when, on hearing that William IV. had consented to the Reform Bill, he ejaculated, “Who’s Silly Billy now?” But this is a digression.
Early in the nineteenth century a famous lady, whose name, for obvious reasons, I forbear to indicate even by an initial, had inherited great wealth under a will which, to put it mildly, occasioned much surprise. She shared an opera-box with a certain Lady D—, who loved the flowing wine-cup not wisely, but too well. One night Lady D— was visibly intoxicated at the opera, and her friend told her that the partnership in the box must cease, as she could not appear again in company so disgraceful. “As you please,” said Lady D—. “I may have had a glass of wine too much; but at any rate I never forged my father’s signature, and then murdered the butler to prevent his telling.”
Beau Brummell, the Prince of Dandies and the most insolent of men, was once asked by a lady if be would “take a cup of tea.” “Thank you, ma’am,” he replied, “I never _take_ anything but physic.” “I beg your pardon,” replied the hostess, “you also take liberties.”
The Duchess of Somerset, born Sheridan, and famous as the Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, was pre-eminent in this agreeable art of swift response. One day she called at a shop for some article which she had purchased the day before, and which had not been sent home. The order could not be traced. The proprietor of the establishment inquired, with great concern, “May I ask who took your Grace’s order? Was it a young gentleman with fair hair?” “No; it was an elderly nobleman with a bald head.”
The celebrated Lady Clanricarde, daughter of George Canning, was talking during the Franco-German War of 1870 to the French Ambassador, who complained bitterly that England had not intervened on behalf of France. “But, after all,” he said, “it was only what we might have expected. We always believed that you were a nation of shopkeepers, and now we know you are.” “And we,” replied Lady Clanricarde, “always believed that you were a nation of soldiers, and now we know you are not”–a repartee worthy to rank with Queen Mary’s reply to Lady Lochleven about the sacramental character of marriage, in the third volume of _The Abbot_.
A young lady, who had just been appointed a Maid of Honour, was telling some friends with whom she was dining that one of the conditions of the office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A cynical man of the world who was present said, “What a tiresome rule! I think I should keep my diary all the same.” “Then,” replied the young lady, “I am afraid you would not be a maid of _Honour_.”
In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank–“Now, Luttrell, we’re all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me.” Eyeing his questioner gravely, Luttrell made answer, “It is an odd question; but as you, Lady Holland, ask it, I don’t mind telling you. If I live till next year, I shall be–devilish old.”
For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen, for Lord Holland’s genial humour, and for Lady Holland’s indiscriminate insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay’s Life and Charles Greville’s Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs. Most of these verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.
Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh, who, as the writer of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, had been the foremost apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O’Coighley, the priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and France, was the basest of mankind. “No, Mackintosh,” replied that sound though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; “he might have been much worse. He was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a renegade.”
These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age. Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the Greville Memoirs–that mine of social information in which I have so often quarried–came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, if he had read them. He replied, “No. I do not feel attracted to them. I remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton.” This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled. In a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady Morley’s comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady Jersey–the Zenobia of _Endymion_–of whom some gushing admirer had said that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of black and diamonds–“it was like night.” “Yes, my dear; _minuit passe_.” A masculine analogue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the table-talk of Lord Granville–certainly not an unkindly man–to whom the late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild. “It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift. I should like to find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is rare.” “Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair.”
When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership of Rossall, a disappointed competitor said that it was a case of [Greek: eneka tou kuriou]; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.
When the _New Review_ was started, its accomplished Editor designed it to be an inexpensive copy of the _Nineteenth Century_. It was to cost only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names–those of the British aristocracy for choice. He was complaining in society of the difficulty of finding a suitable title, when a vivacious lady said, “We have got _Cornhill_, and _Ludgate_, and _Strand_–why not call yours _Cheapside_?”
Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists. Of a small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was said by a friend that he was like Euclid’s definition of a point: he had no parts and no magnitude, but had position. In previous chapters I have quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke. Professor Thorold Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein. Lord Bowen is immortalized by his emendation to the Judge’s address to the Queen, which had contained the Heep-like sentence–“Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the great office to which we have been called.” “Wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘Conscious as we are of one another’s unworthiness’?” Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science–“His only fault is that he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature.” A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General Election of 1880. His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, “Now, that’s really too bad, for —- is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a _Superior Being_.”
At dinner at Balliol the Master’s guests were discussing the careers of two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the other a bishop. “Oh,” said Henry Smith, “I think the bishop is the greater man. A judge, at the most, can only say, ‘You be hanged,’ but a bishop can say, ‘You be d—d.'” “Yes,” twittered the Master; “but if the judge says, ‘You be hanged,’ you _are_ hanged.”
Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory politician–nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and exceptions. When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.
Of Dr. Haig-Brown it is reported that, when Head Master of Charterhouse, he was toasted by the Mayor of Godalming as a man who knew how to combine the _fortiter in re_ with the _suav[=i]ter in modo_. In replying to the toast he said, “I am really overwhelmed not only by the quality, but by the _quantity_ of his Worship’s eulogium.”
It has been a matter of frequent remark that, considering what an immense proportion of parliamentary time has been engrossed during the last seventeen years by Irish speeches, we have heard so little Irish humour, whether conscious or unconscious–whether jokes or “bulls.” An admirably vigorous simile was used by the late Mr. O’Sullivan, when he complained that the whisky supplied at the bar was like “a torchlight procession marching down your throat;” but of Irish bulls in Parliament I have only heard one–proceeding, if my memory serves me, from Mr. T. Healy: “As long as the voice of Irish suffering is dumb, the ear of English compassion is deaf to it.” One I read in the columns of the _Irish Times_: “The key of the Irish difficulty is to be found in the _empty_ pocket of the landlord.” An excellent confusion of metaphors was uttered by one of the members for the Principality in the debate on the Welsh Church Bill, in indignant protest against the allegation that the majority of Welshmen now belonged to the Established Church. He said, “It is a lie, sir; and it is high time that we nailed this lie to the mast.” But a confusion of metaphors is not a bull.
Among tellers of Irish stories, Lord Morris is supreme; one of his best depicts two Irish officials of the good old times discussing, in all the confidence of their after-dinner claret, the principles on which they bestowed their patronage Said the first, “Well, I don’t mind admitting that, _caeteris paribus_, I prefer my own relations.” “My dear boy,” replied his boon companion, “_caeteris paribus_ be d—-d.” The cleverest thing that I have lately heard was from a young lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman. Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them
“The storied Erne and animated bust.”
Frances Countess Waldegrave, who had previously been married three times, took as her fourth husband an Irishman, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, who was shortly afterwards made Chief Secretary. The first night that Lady Waldegrave and Mr. Fortescue appeared at the theatre in Dublin, a wag in the gallery called out, “Which of the four do you like best, my lady?” Instantaneously from the Chief Secretary’s box came the adroit reply: “Why, the Irishman, of course ‘”
The late Lord Coleridge was once speaking in the House of Commons in support of Women’s Rights. One of his main arguments as that there was no essential difference between the masculine and the feminine intellect. For example, he said, some of the most valuable qualities of what is called the judicial genius–sensibility, quickness, delicacy–are peculiarly feminine. In reply, Serjeant Dowse said: “The argument of the hon. and learned Member, compendiously stated, amounts to this–because some judges are old women, therefore all old women are fit to be judges.”
To my friend Mr. Julian Sturgis, himself one of the happiest of phrase-makers, I am indebted for the following gems from America.
Mr. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, showed an English friend the place where Washington was said to have thrown a dollar across the Potomac. The English friend expressed surprise; “but,” said Mr. Evarts, “you must remember that a dollar went further in those days.” A Senator met Mr. Evarts next day, and said that he had been amused by his jest. “But,” said Mr. Evarts, “I met a mere journalist just afterwards who said, ‘Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a sovereign across the Atlantic.'” Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes, would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent wines of which he was afraid.
It was Mr. Motley who said in Boston–“Give me the luxuries of life, and I care not who has the necessaries.”
Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings (among them the well-known “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris”), heard some grave city fathers debating what could be done to mitigate the cruel east wind at an exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He suggested that they should tether a shorn lamb there.
A witty Bostonian going to dine with a lady was met by her with a face of apology. “I could not get another man,” she said; “and we are four women, and you will have to take us all in to dinner.” “Fore-warned is four-armed,” said he with a bow.
This gentleman was in a hotel in Boston when the law forbidding the sale of liquor was in force. “What would you say,” said an angry Bostonian, “if a man from St. Louis, where they have freedom, were to come in and ask you where he could get a drink?” Now it was known that spirits could be clandestinely bought in a room under the roof, and the wit pointing upwards replied, “I should say, ‘Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel.'”
Madame Apponyi was in London during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867, and, like all foreigners and not a few Englishmen, was much perplexed by the “Compound Householder,” who figured so largely in the discussion. Hayward explained that he was the Masculine of the Femme Incomprise.
One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the justest, was made by “the gorgeous Lady Blessington” to Napoleon III. When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington’s hospitable and brilliant but Bohemian house. And she, when visiting Paris after the _coup d’etat_ naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the unbounded hospitalities of Gore House. Weeks passed, no invitation arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington’s presence. At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception. As he passed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught sight of his former hostess. “Ah, Miladi Blessington! Restez-vous longtemps a Paris?” “Et vous, Sire?” History does not record the usurper’s reply.
Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him there burst into dithyrambics and cried, “What a lovely spot this is, Bishop! It is so Swiss.” “Yes, ma’am,” blandly replied old Harry of Exeter, “it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and there are no mountains here.” To one of his clergy desiring to renew a lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as the fine on renewal. The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said, “Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly your lordship has got the lion’s share.” “But, my dear sir, I am sure you would not wish me to have that of the other creature.”
Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate. Bishop Wilberforce, whose powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always ready to use them where retaliation was possible–not in the safe enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the platform and the House of Lords. At the great meeting in St. James’s Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts of “Speak up, my lord.” “I am already speaking up,” replied the Bishop in his most dulcet tone; “I always speak up; and I decline to speak down to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery.” Every one whose memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will remember the melancholy circumstances under which Lord Westbury had to resign his office. When he was leaving the Royal Closet after surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen’s hands, Lord Westbury met the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen. It was a painful encounter, and in reminding the Bishop of the occurrence when next they met, Westbury said, “I felt inclined to say, ‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'” The Bishop in relating this used to say, “I never in my life was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, ‘Yea, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity.’ But by a great effort I kept it down, and said, ‘Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?'” The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting. The Bishop urged that it had a worldly appearance. The clergyman replied that it was not a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop had been present. The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house, but was never within three rooms of the dancing. “Oh, if it comes to that,” replied the clergyman, “I never am within three fields of the hounds.”
One of the best replies–it is scarcely a repartee–traditionally reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott. A brother-Fellow of Oriel had behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott: “My friend, I’m afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night.” “My dear fellow, I assure you I observed nothing unusual.”
In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke’s talk. A good instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke’s sympathy, said, “I have the greatest contempt for Aristotle.” “But not that contempt which familiarity breeds, I should imagine,” was Sherbrooke’s mild rejoinder. “I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night,” I once heard a lady say, “and a place to spare. Lord Sherbrooke, will you come? If you are engaged, I must take the Bishop of Gibraltar.” “Oh, that’s no good. Gibraltar can never be taken.”
In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. “For example,” he said, “we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to me that the New Historians prove too much–indeed, they prove the very point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College.”
Lord Beaconsfield’s excellence in conversation lay rather in studied epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came forward, a young, penniless, unknown coxcomb, to contest High Wycombe against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some one in the crowd shouted, “We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what do you stand on?” “I stand on my head,” was the prompt reply, to which Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before. “What do you say to that, sir?” “I say that we all sow our wild oats, and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr. —-.”
A member of the diplomatic service at Rome in the old days of the Temporal Power had the honour of an interview with Pio Nono. The Pope graciously offered him a cigar–“I am told you will find this very fine.” The Englishman made that stupidest of all answers, “Thank your Holiness, but I have no vices.” “This isn’t a vice; if it was you would have it.” Another repartee from the Vatican reached me a few years ago, when the German Emperor paid his visit to Leo XIII. Count Herbert Bismarck was in attendance on his Imperial master, and when they reached the door of the Pope’s audience-chamber the Emperor passed in, and the Count tried to follow. A gentleman of the Papal Court motioned him to stand back, as there must be no third person at the interview between the Pope and the Emperor. “I am Count Herbert Bismarck,” shouted the German, as he struggled to follow his master. “That,” replied the Roman, with calm dignity, “may account for, but it does not excuse, your conduct.”
But, after all these “fash’nable fax and polite annygoats,” as Thackeray would have called them, after all these engaging courtesies of kings and prelates and great ladies, I think that the honours in the way of repartee rest with the little Harrow boy who was shouting himself hoarse in the jubilation of victory after an Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s in which Harrow had it hollow. To him an Eton boy, of corresponding years, severely observed, “Well, you Harrow fellows needn’t be so beastly cocky. When you wanted a Head Master you had to come to Eton to get one.” The small Harrovian was dumfounded for a moment, and then, pulling himself together for a final effort of deadly sarcasm, exclaimed, “Well, at any rate, no one can say that we ever produced a Mr. Gladstone.”
XX.
TITLES.
The List of Honours, usually published on Her Majesty’s Birthday, is this year[23] reserved till the Jubilee Day, and to sanguine aspirants I would say, in Mrs. Gamp’s immortal words, “Seek not to proticipate.” Such a list always contains food for the reflective mind, and some of the thoughts which it suggests may even lie too deep for tears. Why is my namesake picked out for knighthood, while I remain hidden in my native obscurity? Why is my rival made a C.B., while I “go forth Companionless” to meet the chances and the vexations of another year? But there is balm in Gilead. If I have fared badly, my friends have done little better. Like Mr. Squeers, when Bolder’s father was two pound ten short, they have had their disappointments to contend against. A., who was so confident of a peerage, is fobbed off with a baronetcy; and B., whose labours for the Primrose League entitled him to expect the Bath, finds himself grouped with the Queen’s footmen in the Royal Victorian Order. As, when Sir Robert Peel declined to form a Government in 1839, “twenty gentlemen who had not been appointed Under Secretaries for State moaned over the martyrdom of young ambition,” so during the first fortnight of 1897 at least that number of middle-aged self-seekers came to the regretful conclusion that Lord Salisbury was not sufficiently a man of the world for his present position, and inwardly asked why a judge or a surgeon should be preferred before a company-promoter or a party hack. And, while feeling is thus fermenting at the base of the social edifice, things are not really tranquil at the summit.
It is not long since the chief of the princely House of Duff was raised to the first order of the peerage, and one or two opulent earls, encouraged by his example, are understood to be looking upward. Every constitutional Briton, whatever his political creed, has in his heart of hearts a wholesome reverence for a dukedom. Lord Beaconsfield, who understood these little traits of our national character even more perfectly than Thackeray, says of his favourite St. Aldegonde (who was heir to the richest dukedom in the kingdom) that “he held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a Republican of the reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men except dukes, who were a necessity.” That is a delicious touch. St. Aldegonde, whatever his political aberrations, “voiced” the universal sentiment of his less fortunate fellow-citizens; nor can the most soaring ambition of the British Matron desire a nobler epitaph than that of the lady immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby:–
“She drank prussic acid without any water, And died like a Duke-and-a-Duchess’s daughter.”
As, according to Dr. Johnson, all claret would be port if it could, so, presumably, every marquis would like to be a duke; and yet, as a matter of fact, that Elysian translation is not often made. A marquis, properly regarded, is not so much a nascent duke as a magnified earl. A shrewd observer of the world once said to me: “When an earl gets a marquisate, it is worth a hundred thousand pounds in hard money to his family.” The explanation of this cryptic utterance is that, whereas an earl’s younger sons are “misters,” a marquis’s younger sons are “lords.” Each “my lord” can make a “my lady,” and therefore commands a distinctly higher price in the marriage-market of a wholesomely-minded community. Miss Higgs, with her fifty thousand pounds, might scorn the notion of becoming the Honourable Mrs. Percy Popjoy; but as Lady Magnus Charters she would feel a laudable ambition gratified.
An earldom is, in its combination of euphony, antiquity, and association, perhaps the most impressive of all the titles in the peerage. Most rightly did the fourteenth Earl of Derby decline to be degraded into a brand-new duke. An earldom has always been the right of a Prime Minister who wishes to leave the Commons. In 1880 a member of the House of Russell (in which there are certain Whiggish traditions of jobbery) was fighting a hotly contested election, and his ardent supporters brought out a sarcastic placard–“Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield! He made himself an earl and the people poor”; to which a rejoinder was instantly forthcoming–“John, Earl Russell! He made himself an earl and his relations rich.” The amount of truth in the two statements was about equal. In 1885 this order of the peerage missed the greatest distinction which fate is likely ever to offer it, when Mr. Gladstone declined the earldom proffered by her Majesty on his retirement from office. Had he accepted, it was understood that the representatives of the last Earl of Liverpool would have waived their claims to the extinct title, and the greatest of the Queen’s Prime Ministers would have borne the name of the city which gave him birth.
But, magnificent and euphonious as an earldom is, the children of an earl are the half-castes of the peerage. The eldest son is “my lord,” and his sisters are “my lady;” and ever since the days of Mr. Foker, Senior, it has been _de rigueur_ for an opulent brewer to marry an earl’s daughter; but the younger sons are not distinguishable from the ignominious progeny of viscounts and barons. Two little boys, respectively the eldest and the second son of an earl, were playing on the front staircase of their home, when the eldest fell over into the hall below. The younger called to the footman who picked his brother up, “Is he hurt?” “Killed, _my lord_,” was the instantanteous reply of a servant who knew the devolution of a courtesy title.
As the marquises people the debatable land between the dukes and the earls, so do the viscounts between the earls and the barons. A child whom Matthew Arnold was examining in grammar once wrote of certain words which he found it hard to classify under their proper parts of speech that they were “thrown into the common sink, which is adverbs.” I hope I shall not be considered guilty of any disrespect if I say that ex-Speakers, ex-Secretaries of State, successful generals, and ambitious barons who are not quite good enough for earldoms, are “thrown into the common sink, which is viscounts.” Not only heralds and genealogists, but every one who has the historic sense, must have felt an emotion of regret when the splendid title of twenty-third Baron Dacre was merged by Mr. Speaker Brand in the pinchbeck dignity of first Viscount Hampden.
After viscounts, barons. The baronage of England is headed by the bishops; but, as we have already discoursed of those right reverend peers, we, Dante-like, will not reason of them, but pass on–only remarking, as we pass, that it is held on good authority that no human being ever experiences a rapture so intense as an American bishop from a Western State when he first hears himself called “My lord” at a London dinner-party. After the spiritual barons come the secular barons–the “common or garden” peers of the United Kingdom. Of these there are considerably more than three hundred; and of all, except some thirty or forty at the most, it may be said without offence that they are products of the opulent Middle Class. Pitt destroyed deliberately and for ever the exclusive character of the British peerage when, as Lord Beaconsfield said, he “created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy.” And in order to gain admission to this “plebeian aristocracy” men otherwise reasonable and honest will spend incredible sums, undergo prodigious exertions, associate themselves with the basest intrigues, and perform the most unblushing tergiversations. Lord Houghton told me that he said to a well-known politician who boasted that he had refused a peerage: “Then you made a great mistake. A peerage would have secured you three things that you are much in need of–social consideration, longer credit with your tradesmen, and better marriages for your younger children.”
It is unlucky that a comparatively recent change has put it out of the power of a Prime Minister to create fresh Irish peers, for an Irish peerage was a cheap and convenient method of rewarding political service.[24] Lord Palmerston held that, combining social rank with eligibility to the House of Commons, it was the most desirable distinction for a politician. Pitt, when his banker Mr. Smith (who lived in Whitehall) desired the privilege of driving through the Horse Guards, said: “No, I can’t give you that; but I will make you an Irish peer;” and the banker became the first Lord Carrington.
What is a Baronet? ask some. Sir Wilfrid Lawson (who ought to know) replies that he is a man “who has ceased to be a gentleman and has not become a nobleman.” But this is too severe a judgment. It breathes a spirit of contempt bred of familiarity, which may, without irreverence, be assumed by a member of an exalted Order, but which a humble outsider would do well to avoid. As Major Pendennis said of a similar manifestation, “It sits prettily enough on a young patrician in early life, though, nothing is so loathsome among persons of our rank.” I turn, therefore, for an answer to Sir Bernard Burke, who says: “The hereditary Order of Baronets was created by patent in England by King James I. in 1611. At the institution many of the chief estated gentlemen of the kingdom were selected for the dignity. The first batch of Baronets comprised some of the principal landed proprietors among the best-descended gentlemen of the kingdom, and the list was headed by a name illustrious more than any other for the intellectual pre-eminence with which it is associated–the name of Bacon. The Order of Baronets is scarcely estimated at its proper value.”
I cannot help feeling that this account of the baronetage, though admirable in tone and spirit, and actually pathetic in its closing touch of regretful melancholy, is a little wanting in what the French would call “actuality.” It leaves out of sight the most endearing, because the most human, trait of the baronetage–its pecuniary origin. On this point let us hear the historian Hume–“The title of Baronet was sold and two hundred patents of that species of knighthood were disposed of for so many thousand pounds.” This was truly epoch-making. It was one of those “actions of the just” which “smell sweet and blossom in the dust.” King James’s baronets were the models and precursors of all who to the end of time should traffic in the purchase of honours. Their example has justified posterity, and the precedent which they set is to-day the principal method by which the war-chests of our political parties are replenished.
Another authority, handling the same high theme, tells us that the rebellion in Ulster gave rise to this Order, and “it was required of each baronet on his creation to pay into the Exchequer as much as would maintain thirty soldiers three years at eight-pence a day in the province of Ulster,” and, as a historical memorial of their original service, the baronets bear as an augmentation to their coats-of-arms the royal badge of Ulster–a Bloody Hand on a white field. It was in apt reference to this that a famous Whip, on learning that a baronet of his party was extremely anxious to be promoted to the peerage, said, “You can tell Sir Peter Proudflesh, with my compliments, that we don’t do these things for nothing. If he wants a peerage, he will have to put his Bloody Hand into his pocket.”
For the female mind the baronetage has a peculiar fascination. As there was once a female Freemason, so there was once a female baronet–Dame Maria Bolles, of Osberton, in the County of Nottingham. The rank of a baronet’s wife is not unfrequently conferred on the widow of a man to whom a baronetcy had been promised and who died too soon to receive it. “Call me a vulgar woman!” screamed a lady once prominent in society when a good-natured friend repeated a critical comment. “Call me a vulgar woman! me, who was Miss Blank, of Blank Hall, and if I had been a boy should have been a baronet!”
The baronets of fiction are, like their congeners in real life, a numerous and a motley band. Lord Beaconsfield described, with a brilliancy of touch which was all his own, the labours and the sacrifices of Sir Vavasour Firebrace on behalf of the Order of Baronets and the privileges wrongfully withheld from them. “They are evidently the body destined to save this country; blending all sympathies–the Crown, of which they are the peculiar champions: the nobles, of whom they are the popular branch; the people, who recognize in them their natural leaders…. Had the poor King lived, we should at least have had the Badge,” added Sir Vavasour mournfully.
“The Badge?”
“It would have satisfied Sir Grosvenor le Draughte; he was for compromise. But, confound him, his father was only an accoucheur.”
A great merit of the baronets, from the novelist’s point of view, is that they and their belongings are so uncommonly easy to draw. He is Sir Grosvenor, his wife is Lady le Draughte, his sons, elder and younger, are Mr. le Draughte, and his daughters Miss le Draughte. The wayfaring men, though fools, cannot err where the rule is so simple, and accordingly the baronets enjoy a deserved popularity with those novelists who look up to the titled classes of society as men look at the stars, but are a little puzzled about their proper designations. Miss Braddon alone has drawn more baronets, virtuous and vicious, handsome and hideous, than would have colonized Ulster ten times over and left a residue for Nova Scotia. Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Barnes Newcome will live as long as English novels are read, and I hope that dull forgetfulness will never seize as its prey Sir Alfred Mogyns Smyth de Mogyns, who was born Alfred Smith Muggins, but traced a descent from Hogyn Mogyn of the Hundred Beeves, and took for his motto “Ung Roy ung Mogyns.” His pedigree is drawn in the seventh chapter of the _Book of Snobs_, and is imitated with great fidelity on more than one page of Burke’s Peerage.
An eye closely intent upon the lesser beauties of the natural world will find a very engaging specimen of the genus Baronet in Sir Barnet Skettles, who was so kind to Paul Dombey and so angry with poor Mr. Baps. Sir Leicester Dedlock is on a larger scale–in fact, almost too “fine and large” for life. But I recall a fleeting vision of perfect loveliness among Miss Monflathers’s pupils–“a baronet’s daughter who by some extraordinary reversal of the laws of Nature was not only plain in feature but dull in intellect.”
So far we have spoken only of hereditary honours; but our review would be singularly incomplete if it excluded those which are purely personal. Of these, of course, incomparably the highest is the Order of the Garter, and its most characteristic glory is that, in Lord Melbourne’s phrase, “there is no d—-d nonsense of merit about it.” The Emperor of Lilliput rewarded his courtiers with three fine silken threads, one of which was blue, one green, and one red. The Emperor held a stick horizontally, and the candidates crept under it, backwards and forwards, several times. Whoever showed the most agility in creeping was rewarded with the blue thread.
Let us hope that the methods of chivalry have undergone some modification since the days of Queen Anne, and that the Blue Ribbon of the Garter, which ranks with the Golden Fleece and makes its wearer a comrade of all the crowned heads of Europe, is attained by arts more dignified than those which awoke the picturesque satire of Dean Swift. But I do not feel sure about it.
Great is the charm of a personal decoration. Byron wrote:
“Ye stars, that are the poetry of heaven.”
“A stupid line,” says Mr. St. Barbe in _Endymion_; “he should have written, ‘Ye stars, that are the poetry of dress.'” North of the Tweed the green thread of Swift’s imagination–“the most ancient and most noble Order of the Thistle”–is scarcely less coveted than the supreme honour of the Garter; but wild horses should not drag from me the name of the Scottish peer of whom his political leader said, “If I gave —- the Thistle, he would eat it.” The Bath tries to make up by the lurid splendour of its ribbon and the brilliancy of its star for its comparatively humble and homely associations. It is the peculiar prize of Generals and Home Secretaries, and is displayed with manly openness on the bosom of the statesman once characteristically described by Lord Beaconsfield as “Mr. Secretary Cross, whom I can never remember to call Sir Richard.”
But, after all said and done, the institution of knighthood is older than any particular order of knights; and lovers of the old world must observe with regret the discredit into which it has fallen since it became the guerdon of the successful grocer. When Lord Beaconsfield left office in 1880 he conferred a knighthood–the first of a long series similarly bestowed–on an eminent journalist. The friends of the new knight were inclined to banter him, and proposed his health at a dinner in facetious terms. Lord Beaconsfield, who was of the company, looked preternaturally grave, and, filling his glass, gazed steadily at the flattered editor and said in his deepest tone: “Yes, Sir A.B., I drink to your good health, and I congratulate you on having attained a rank which was deemed sufficient honour for Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren.”
But a truce to this idle jesting on exalted themes–too palpably the utterance of social envy and mortified ambition. “They _are_ our superiors, and that’s the fact,” as Thackeray exclaims in his chapter on the Whigs. “I am not a Whig myself; but, oh, how I should like to be one!” In a similar spirit of compunctious self-abasement, the present writer may exclaim, “I have not myself been included in the list of Birthday Honours,–but, oh, how I should like to be there!”
FOOTNOTES:
[23] 1897.
[24] Since this passage was written, a return has been made to the earlier practice, and an Irish peerage has been created–the first since 1868.
XXI.
THE QUEEN’S ACCESSION.
The writer of these chapters would not willingly fall behind his countrymen in the loyal sentiments and picturesque memories proper to the “high mid-summer pomps” which begin to-morrow.[25] But there is an almost insuperable difficulty in finding anything to write which shall be at once new and true; and this chapter must therefore consist mainly of extracts. As the sun of August brings out wasps, so the genial influence of the Jubilee has produced an incredible abundance of fibs, myths, and fables. They have for their subject the early days of our Gracious Sovereign, and round that central theme they play with every variety of picturesque inventiveness. Nor has invention alone been at work. Research has been equally busy. Miss Wynn’s description, admirable in its simplicity, of the manner in which the girl queen received the news of her accession was given to the world by Abraham Hayward in _Diaries of a Lady of Quality_ a generation ago. Within the last month it must have done duty a hundred times.
Scarcely less familiar is the more elaborate but still impressive passage from _Sybil_, in which Lord Beaconsfield described the same event. And yet, as far as my observation has gone, the citations from this fine description have always stopped short just at the opening of the most appropriate passage; my readers, at any rate, shall see it and judge it for themselves. If there is one feature in the national life of the last sixty years on which Englishmen may justly pride themselves it is the amelioration of the social condition of the workers. Putting aside all ecclesiastical revivals, all purely political changes, and all appeals, however successful, to the horrible arbitrament of the sword, it is Social Reform which has made the Queen’s reign memorable and glorious. The first incident of that reign was described in _Sybil_ not only with vivid observation of the present, but with something of prophetic insight into the future.
“In a sweet and thrilling voice, and with a composed mien which indicates rather the absorbing sense of august duty than an absence of emotion, THE QUEEN announces her accession to the throne of her ancestors, and her humble hope that Divine Providence will guard over the fulfilment of her lofty trust. The prelates and captains and chief men of her realm then advance to the throne, and, kneeling before her, pledge their troth and take the sacred oaths of allegiance and supremacy–allegiance to one who rules over the land that the great Macedonian could not conquer, and over a continent of which Columbus never dreamed: to the Queen of every sea, and of nations in every zone.
“It is not of these that I would speak, but of a nation nearer her footstool, and which at this moment looks to her with anxiety, with affection, perhaps with hope. Fair and serene, she has the blood and beauty of the Saxon. Will it be her proud destiny at length to bear relief to suffering millions, and with that soft hand which might inspire troubadours and guerdon knights, break the last links in the chain of Saxon thraldom?”
To-day, with pride and thankfulness, chastened though it be by our sense of national shortcomings, we can answer _Yes_ to this wistful question of genius and humanity. We have seen the regulation of dangerous labour, the protection of women and children from excessive toil, the removal of the tax on bread, the establishment of a system of national education; and in Macaulay’s phrase, a point which yesterday was invisible is our goal to-day, and will be our starting-post to-morrow.
Her Majesty ascended the throne on the 20th of June 1837, and on the 29th the _Times_ published a delightfully characteristic article against the Whig Ministers, “into whose hands the all but infant and helpless Queen has been compelled by her unhappy condition to deliver up herself and her indignant people.” Bating one word, this might be an extract from an article on the formation of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Government. Surely the consistency of the _Times_ in evil-speaking is one of the most precious of our national possessions: On the 30th of June the Royal Assent was given by commission to forty Bills–the first Bills which became law in the Queen’s reign; and, the clerks in the House of Lords having been accustomed ever since the days of Queen Anne to say “his Majesty” and “Le Roy le veult,” there was hopeless bungling over the feminine appellations, now after 130 years revived. However, the Bills scrambled through somehow, and among them was the Act which abolished the pillory–an auspicious commencement of a humane and reforming reign. On the 8th of July came the rather belated burial of William IV. at Windsor, and on the 11th the newly completed Buckingham Palace was occupied for the first time, the Queen and the Duchess of Kent moving thither from Kensington.
On the 17th of July, Parliament was prorogued by the Queen in person. Her Majesty’s first Speech from the Throne referred to friendly relations with Foreign Powers, the diminution of capital punishment, and “discreet improvements in ecclesiastical institutions.” It was read in a clear and musical voice, with a fascinating grace of accent and elocution which never faded from the memory of those who heard it. As long as her Majesty continued to open and prorogue Parliament in person the same perfection of delivery was always noticed. An old M.P., by no means inclined to be a courtier, told me that when her Majesty approached the part of her speech relating to the estimates, her way of uttering the words “Gentlemen of the House of Commons” was the most winning address he had ever heard: it gave to an official demand the character of a personal request. After the Prince Consort’s death, the Queen did not again appear at Westminster till the opening of the new Parliament in 1866. On that occasion the speech was read by the Lord Chancellor, and the same usage has prevailed whenever her Majesty has opened Parliament since that time. But on several occasions of late years she has read her reply to addresses presented by public bodies, and I well recollect that at the opening of the Imperial Institute in 1893, though the _timbre_ of her voice was deeper than in early years, the same admirable elocution made every syllable audible.
In June 1837 the most lively emotion in the masses of the people was the joy of a great escape. I have said before that grave men, not the least given to exaggeration, told me their profound conviction that, had Ernest Duke of Cumberland succeeded to the throne on the death of William IV., no earthly power could have averted a revolution. The plots of which the Duke was the centre have been described with a due commixture of history and romance in Mr. Allen Upward’s fascinating story, _God save the Queen_. Into the causes of his intense unpopularity, this is not the occasion to enter; but let me just describe a curious print of the year 1837 which lies before me as I write. It is headed “The Contrast,” and is divided into two panels. On your left hand is a young girl, simply dressed in mourning, with a pearl necklace and a gauzy shawl, and her hair coiled in plaits, something after the fashion of a crown. Under this portrait is “_Victoria_.” On the other side of the picture is a hideous old man, with shaggy eyebrows and scowling gaze, wrapped in a military cloak with fur collar and black stock. Under this portrait is “_Ernest_” and running the whole length of the picture is the legend:–
“Look here upon _this_ picture–and–on this, The counterfeit presentment of two sov’reigns.”
This print was given to me by a veteran Reformer, who told me that it expressed in visible form the universal sentiment of England. That sentiment was daily and hourly confirmed by all that was heard and seen of the girl-queen. We read of her walking with a gallant suite upon the terrace at Windsor; dressed in scarlet uniform and mounted on her roan charger, to receive with uplifted hand the salute of her troops; or seated on the throne of the Plantagenets at the opening of her Parliament, and invoking the Divine benediction on the labours which should conduce to “the welfare and contentment of My people.” We see her yielding her bright intelligence to the constitutional guidance, wise though worldly, of her first Prime Minister, the sagacious Melbourne. And then, when the exigencies of parliamentary government forced her to exchange her Whig advisers for the Tories, we see her carrying out with exact propriety the lessons taught by “the friend of her youth,” and extending to each premier in turn, whether personally agreeable to her