THE GIFT OF MAY TREAT MORRISON IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER F MORRISON PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD BY T. H. S. E SCOTT AUTHOR OF 'ENGLAND — ITS PEOPLE, POLITY, AND PURSUITS,' 'social TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE,' ETC. LONDON HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED 13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET 1898 All rights reserved Richard Clay &, Sons, Limited, LoNDOK & Bungay. d^ fk% ^1^ P PREFACE The following sketches are of course intentionally confined to persons now living. They cannot therefore exhaust all the personal forces of the period ; seeing that many of these continue to be operative after the ^ individuals in which they were embodied have passed {;j away. 2 For the reason just stated, though the book was still being written while Mr, Gladstone yet breathed, the anticipated issue of his illness rendered it more O appropriate to the scheme of the little volume to ce recognize his surviving influence on all departments 2 of public life in an estimate of more than one among aj his followers and pupils, e.g. Lord Welby and Sir < William Harcourt. ^ Sir Edward Burne-Jones cannot see the words about ** himself which it was hoped might meet his eye. His P lamented death occurred only after the book had been t printed. The remarks under his name deal with other artists than himself as influenced by him ; they may, therefore, be left as when first written. 547 PREFACE The writer has had the advantage in, he beheves, every doubtful case of personal or historical statement, of referring the question to the individual dealt with ; he would take this opportunity of thanking all those (and he has had no refusal) who have so willingly and valuably helped his industry and guarded it against misrepresentation. T. H. S. E. Brighton, June 1898. VI CONTENTS AT COURT FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OP DEVONSHIRE THE EARL OF ROSEBBRY THE PARTY OF TWO — SIR CHARLES DILKB, MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN THE BROTHERS BALFOUR SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT LORD WELBY : PERMANENT OFFICIALS, IMPERIAL AND CIVIC DIPLOMATISTS — NEW STYLE, AND SIR PHILIP CURRIE LORD WOLSELEY AND " THOSE ABOUT IIIM " LORD CHARLES BERESFORD LORD CHIEF JUSTICE RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN LORD ASHBOURNE (mR. EDWARD GIBSON) THE ROTHSCHILDS LORD GLENESK PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE BISHOP AND HISTORIAN : THE RT. REV. DR. C. W. STUBBS CANON GORE AND THE LUX MUNDI SCHOOL PERSONAL FORCES OF NONCONFORMITY AN ACADEMICAL GROUP vii 1 17 34 51 69 83 93 106 115 128 141 150 161 170 183 192 207 213 219 225 CONTENTS PAGE THE "faculty" as A SOCIAL FORCE ... ... 233 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK ... ... ... ... 241 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES ... ... 251 ALFRED AUSTIN AND SOME OTHER SINGERS ... 269 SIR E. BURNE-JONES AND THE P.R.A. ... ... 276 SIR HENRY IRVING AND OTHER LIGHTS OF THE PLAY 284 LONDON HOSTESSES ... ... ... ... 297 SOME PERSONAL FORCES — LESS VISIBLE BUT NOT LESS REAL ... ... ... ... ... 304 MR. CECIL RHODES AND HIS FRIENDS ... ... 311 MR. W. W. ASTOR AND THE AMERICAN COLONY ... 318 VIU PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD AT COURT " How art Thou calm amid the storm, young Queen ! Amid this wide and joy-distracted throng ? Where has the range of life-experience been To keep thy heart thus equable and strong 1 Can the secluded cold which may belong To such high state compose thy noble mien, Without the duteous purpose not to wrong The truth of some Ideal spirit-seen 1 Perchance the depth of what I boldly asked None know — nor I, nor Thou. Yet let us pray That Thou, in this exceeding glory masked. Be not to loss of thy true self beguiled ; Still able at thy Maker's feet to lay The living loving nature of a child." If it be the mission of the poet to be the prophet as well as the interpreter of his age, the duty could not have been discharged better than by the Monckton Milnes who became Lord Houghton. The sonnet just quoted, written in the year of Her Majesty's accession, divines the thoughts which then engaged all subjects PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of the new Sovereign. Nor does it only state the problem; it suggests the answer which time is to evolve. The verses are thus a revelation of hidden character, as well as an expression of the loyalty that was the controlling sentiment of the hour. With the necessary change of tenses and the substitution of achievement for aspiration, the little poem would be no misleading epitome of the history of the present reign, as well as a true and happy portrait of the character progressively unveiled or developed by Her Majesty since she was called to the throne. The anxiety that prompted the questions of the poet, which were also those of the people, argued no fears dishonouring to the ruler. Not only in England, but in two countries with which we were then in alliance, Spain and Portugal, the crown was worn by a woman. More than a century had elapsed since a like experi- ence had been that of Great Britain. The fights of political factions at home, the engagement of the country in exhausting wars abroad, that summed up much of the history of the reign of Queen Anne, did not seem of entirely hopeful omen to thoughtful Englishmen trying to forecast the fortunes of Queen Victoria. The whole world might still be said to rock in the ground-swell of international war or of domestic disaffection. The legislation of 1832, by taking the middle classes into partnership in the administration 2 AT COURT of the British Empire, had made representative government a reality. Lord Grey's measure had fallen far short of satisfying the political agitation which was expressed in the demand for the Bill. The revolutionary appetite was whetted ; the pro- gramme of Constitutional Radicals was yet to be ful- filled ; the masses made no attempt to hide their dis- appointment at legislation which by establishing an uniform £10 suffrage had the effect of disfranchising thousands of their number in the great industrial centres of Lancashire, especially Preston. The Whig oligarchy, then led by Grey — the nominee of an aristo- cratic committee as five-and-twenty years earlier it had been led by Charles Fox, acting as delegate of the same authority — was not indeed suspected of designs fatal to the great institutions of the realm. The Whig reformers, it was argued, were the creatures of external forces of the most dangerous kind. Whig- gism itself, one was told, originated nothing, was merely an instrument in the hands of Irish Repealers and English Republicans to work their ends. Already the new Parliamentary Radicals were planning attacks on the Church. Some of their organs in the press had set a short temi to the survival of hereditary king- ship. One set of thinkers, portrayed with historic truth in the earlier novels of Disraeli, described their country as " Radical ridden." Another declared it to PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD be " Priest ridden." A third painted it as at the mercy of the professional Atheists of the North. The early Oxford Tractarians, by their insistence on authority and tradition, had seemed to fling a challenge to those who held a visible Church with a history running through the ages to be a fiction, and who sometimes might use language which seemed to convey more than a doubt if the Invisible Head of that Church were not a fiction also. To those looking back by the light of what has since happened upon these ecclesiastical alarmists, the apprehension now appears absurd; the notion then seriously held by many good and reason- able men of allying the Anglican with the Greek Communion provokes a smile. But sober and cool- headed Churchmen like Keble doubted whether the Established Faith in England could last out another generation ; the return to Rome was impossible ; the alliance with Moscow might prove the sole alternative to the Anglican polity being swamped in a confused sea of sects. To many practical politicians it seemed only the other day that the uncle of the young Queen, William IV., had stretched prerogative to an unwise length in its relations with the Whig Ministry of Melbourne. Every department and interest of the national life appeared to be in the crucible. If the young Queen should show the spirit of the relative who innnediately AT COURT preceded her in matters that she might fairly think touched her hereditary right, was not a revolution, very different from that peaceful change of dynasty placing William III. on the throne, inevitable ? If during those years the public press had been organized with anything of the completeness of to-day, this wide- spread uneasiness would have been allayed almost as soon as it was felt. Daily or weekly newspapers, at the price of a penny or halfpenny, would have carried to every corner of the realm minute and true narra- tives indubitably showing the possession by the young Sovereign of the qualities conjecturally ascribed to her in the loyal sonnet already quoted. But news of this sort then travelled very slowly. In the absence of any cheap and effective agency for its circulation, the reassuring details tardily became known through irre- sponsible and precarious depositories of the truth. Not till in 1845 Disraeli's novel Sibi/l appeared, with its preface describing, on the authority of a venerable statesman who was present, the bearing of Queen Victoria at her first Council, had a true estimate been formed of the great qualities that at all crises of State the young Queen might be trusted to display. Once these facts were realized by the people, the declaration of confidence in the Sovereign was not slowly given. Within five years of the passing of the Reform Act, the constituencies which were the 5 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD creations of that measure showed their gratitude to the party by continuing their confidence in the very safe Whiggism of the Avise and trusted adviser of the young Queen, Lord Melbourne himself. The national in- stinct rightly judged the attributes, of which Her Majesty had already given evidence, to be the best safeguards against the abuse of supreme power. Gradually the comfortable conviction had spread through all classes that for the first time in their history they were to be reigned over by a Sovereign whose business it would be not merely to fix their loyalty, but to win their affection ; to show herself progressively, as years went on, rather the friend and mother than the first magistrate of her people. To recapitulate how that demonstration has been con- sistently made would be to summarize the social and domestic story of the longest reign in history. Those who care to do so, by visiting the building in Albemarle Street, may see the Queen's signature in a bold, matronly hand, very different from the cramped caligraphy then common among young ladies, in the book of membership of the Royal Society. She had, before that entry was made, volunteered to one of her Ministers the remark that the triumphs of her people during her reign would diflfcr from those of other epochs in being victories of science. With that pre- sentiment, when the time came she secured for her 6 AT COURT eldest son Michael Faraday as a teacher in the new learning which was to colour the Victorian age. Not only Sir Theodore Martin's biography but all the memoirs of the period prove it to have been the stead- fast purpose of the Queen to identify herself and her Court with the lead of the scientific not less than the artistic and literary patronage of the day. In the case of physical science, as of music, this resolve showed itself by the active part taken by the Prince Consort in the British Association meetings that were them- selves older only by six years than the reign of the Queen, as well as by the Royal opening of the Kew Observatory in 1842. Music had been personally favoured by all the Georges; our own Court's en- couragement of the music of the old English masters was therefore but the fulfilment of an existing tradi- tion. The husband of the Queen himself excelled in all those pursuits which he promoted ; he gave Prince Alfred his first violin lessons; he was therefore com- petent to judge as well as patronize. Once at least during his lifetime the British Association met in Scotland. The Court was then at Balmoral. Sir Theodore Martin, or Her Majesty's own Highland Journal, or authentic local tradition, has recorded the presence at Court not only of the most prominent British, but of many well-known Continental savants visiting England. Had the life of the Prince Consort PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD been prolonged, the alliance between sceptre and savant might yet have been more close and productive. When, however, one remembers the shortness of the Queen's married life, and the comparative youth of her husband at his death, the recorded results of the movement are not insignificant. But for this early precedent, re- cognizing the private labours of peace not less than the triumphs of diplomacy or generalship as fit objects for Royal acknowledgment, the scientific peer would not have seemed as natural a promotion of our period as the medical baronet, the City and the railway knight. Three years after the death of the Prince Consort, the Crown illustrated his view of its social oppor- tunities by creating the physicist Sir William Thomson Lord Kelvin — thirty-four years later, in conformity with that precedent, the inventor of the antiseptic treatment becoming Lord Lister. If the peerages of a Bulwer Lytton and a Macaulay were partly political as well as literary, letters alone were honoured in the ennobling of a Tennyson. Before he became famous the poet had received the personal friendship of his Sovereign. Tennyson's successor, Alfred Austin, has found the same welcome from the first lady in the land, who finds time to read scarcely less than any of her subjects. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Theodore Martin, Edwin Landseer, belong to the forces of the past. The place they occupied in the regard 8 AT COURT of the Court is historical. The public opinion of the more representative subjects of the Queen places the best stage-players among the forces of their period. As it has become increasingly plain that Matthew Arnold's advice, " Organize the theatre," was no mere compliment of the moment, no considerable player fails to receive at some time or other a request to appear at Court. In all such social exercises of her prerogative, the Sovereign has been helped by her natural vicegerents and deputies, her own children. While these pages are being written, the confidence and hope of soldiers are centred on the Queen's youngest son, the Duke of Connaught, as the eventual successor to his kinsman, the Duke of Cambridge, when the term of the present Commander-in-Chief, Lord Wolseley, shall have been filled. Those who knew Prince Arthur in his Wool- wich days, who have since seen him in turn master the professional details of each arm of his Service, horse, foot, and artillery, are not surprised at the precise knowledge of the technique of his profession successively displayed. Those who appreciate, as every one brought into contact with him does, the absolute fairness and inaccessibility to merely private or personal influences of the Duke of Cambridge, are the most strongly persuaded of the professional ad- vantages of the system that regards the headship 9 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of the army as something more than a prize for professional competitors, even of the highest order of merit. The Prince of Wales inherited from his father that capacity for constant movement from place to place which defies fatigue of body or mind. Part of his birthright also was a remarkable aptitude for the successful administration of business posts or the transaction of executive details. Left to do the work in his own way, from the chairmanship of a charity dinner to the presidency of an international com- mission, the Heir Apparent as a man of business has no rivals of his own few of any, rank. This faculty he may share with some of his brothers ; he differs from most of them, even from his second, the Duke of Coburg, in the breadth and quickness of his sympathies, in the power of losing sight of him- self and his tastes in the business immediately before him, as well as in a shrewd and trained insight into character and the forces governing events. Those are qualities that, combined with a prince's opportunities of knowledge, make the Prince of Wales in foreign affairs one of the best of English politicians, and, in the active exercise of the art, one of the best diplomatists in the world. Sovereigns and princes who in public reveal them- 10 AT COURT selves through their Ministers, in private act through the officials attached to them. No sketch, therefore, of the Court can pardonably omit those figures through whom the Crown, its future as well as its actual wearer, transacts the business of the day. These personal agencies in the past are recorded in the book of Sir Theodore Martin. With respect to the present, now, as ever, the Sovereign has shown her regard for her army in replacing General Sir Henry Ponsonby by another member of his profession. Sir Arthur Bigge, as the Private Secretary of the Sove- reign, is in the eyes of his countrymen a public insti- tution ; his record is full of interest, public and pro- fessional not less than personal. An officer of the Scientific Corps, when lieutenant in the Royal Artil- lery, Sir Arthur Bigge was in the same battery as that selected for the Prince Imperial of France to join. Volunteering for service in South Africa, Sir Arthur was through the Zulu war, though in hospital during the latter part of the campaign. On his return to England, Captain Bigge visited the Empress Eugenie to complete, so far as he could, the account of the sad death of her son. The Empress was then staying at Abergeldie Castle. In this way the young gunner was first presented to the Queen during the October of 1879. In 1880 came his appointment as Groom- in- Waiting. Shortly before this his professional pro- 11 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD motion had taken place. He had been appointed aide-de-camp to General Sir Evelyn Wood. In the August of 1880, on the death of Colonel Pickard, Captain Bigge made another step at Court, and was nominated Assistant Private Secretary to the Sove- reign, as well as Assistant Keeper of the Privy Purse. In 1881 he became also Equerry-in-Ordinary. In 1895 the Queen lost by death the officer who had so long been attached to her. Sir Henry Ponsonby was succeeded by Sir Arthur Bigge as full Private Secretary; the successor as Privy Purse being Sir Fleetwood Edwards. Not the least proof of the opinion in high places held of this official had been his selection in 1880 to accompany the former Empress of the French on her visit to South Africa. Few things more endeared the Queen and her husband to the parental sense of the English people than the extreme circumspection shown from the first in choosing the entourage of the Prince of Wales. Of his tutors and other teachers enough elsewhere has been written. The name of the official standing in the same relation to the Prince that Sir Arthur Bigge does to the Sovereign is as familiar to the public as that of the Prince himself Less known, however, than they deserve to be are the national services which his active and unfailing loyalty to his chief has given Sir Francis Knollys 12 AT COURT the opportunity of rendering. The descendant, like the Cecils, of great Elizabethan statesmen, Francis Knollys combines with the devotion of a patriot to the throne the unfailing good sense in which his ancestors excelled, which all Englishmen respect, but for which historic descent is not in itself a guarantee. Than the unfailing judgment as dis- played by the private secretary of the Prince of Wales, there could be no better bulwark to the throne itself. Sir William Knollys, the father of Francis, was suc- cessively first commander of the Aldershot camp, " Governor " to the Pi'ince of Wales, a leading member of the Committee of Military Education, and Gold Stick in Waiting. General Knollys only left the Prince of Wales in 1877. Before then, Francis Knollys, from January 1863 onwards Secretary to the Comptroller and Treasurer of the Household, took up in 1870 the duties of private secretary to the Heir Apparent. The atmosphere of Courts is proverbially apt to be disturbed by cabals and factions. That no • commotion of this sort has existed in the Court of the Prince of Wales, or even in an age of gossip been imputed to it, is partly due to the tact in all the details of daily life displayed by the private secretary. Never has there moved in the precinct of St. James a man in whom common-sense approaches so nearly to 13 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD positive genius. Upon Marlborough House there have long devolved many or most of those miscellaneous functions of a social sort which, had the Prince Consort lived, might have been discharged by Buckingham Palace. The Prince of Wales has become not only the First Gentleman in England, but to a great extent also the head of every department of our complex social polity. Politics, sport, art, letters, medicine, theology, law, charity, philanthropy, the turf, the stage — each of these divisions of our social system may be compared to some European power, whose repre- sentatives are accredited to foreign Courts. The mark of completeness in the organization of all these interests is their recognition by the Heir Apparent in his official capacity and the reception of their typical members into the number of his private acquaintances. Some disadvantages may be incidental to such an arrangement. The keen and ever-increasing competition of social sections or of individuals to be free of Marlborough House, and to entertain its master, has introduced a certain element of competition into the intercourse of equals and friends during the London season. That, however, is due to the frailty of human nature, to the instinctive yearning of civilized man for Court recognition, and not to any individual agent, high or low. 14 AT COURT The Prince of Wales very seldom writes a letter with his own hand ; one who had during long years been brought into close contact with His Royal Highness, declared the only autograph notes received from him to have been the little paper memoranda penned by the Prince at committee meet- ings and lightly thrown across the table to the person thus addressed. Neither of course can the Queen's eldest son receive in person all with whom he is willing to discuss the movements of public interest. Thus by an inevitable process Sir Francis Knollys is in personal touch with the chief members of every profession, of every interest not yet perhaps organized into a profession, from high diplomacy to the reporters of the provincial press. How to consult the interests of the Prince, to satisfy the public, morbidly sensitive in all which concerns its national possession of royalty; how, while doing this, to avoid giving umbrage to applicants by a reticence they resent, or compro- mising his master by any indiscretion of good-nature ; these are the problems which the time of Sir Francis Knollys is spent in solving. That the effort is suc- cessful may be infallibly inferred, from the absence of discontent in the outside world on the one hand, or on the other the failure of incidents on which reserve is politic prematurely to divulge themselves. All 15 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD sovereigns and heirs apparent have had their con- fidential private secretaries like those now mentioned. But the growing complexity of English society has given Sir Arthur Bigge and Sir Francis Knollys opportunities of serving the Crown such as in the nature of things none of his predecessors could have known. 16 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY f-|-^ORD Salisbury has inherited from Lord Beaconsfield not only his State office, but his faculty of exciting the personal interest of all classes in himself. Lord Salis- bury's policy, its results, the successive stages of his career, and the point to which they have conducted him, are before the world. But of the man himself, his principles or preferences, little is popularly known ; certainly these points are less the subjects of popular and plausible gossip than in the case of Disraeli. The conventional view of him as the incarnation of aristocratic pride, of scorn for most of his foes, of veiled contempt or distrust for some of his friends, is not perhaps now seriously taken by any intelligent person. What then is the true Lord Salisbury ? Though in 1898 he only wants two years of three-score and ten, 17 c PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD his name was not much in the popular mouth before 1867. "The young man's head is on fire!" was the widely repeated remark made by Mr. Disraeli when on the Household Suffrage measure of thirty years ago, the then Lord Cranborne threw up the Indian Secre- taryship of State. Since then, his fame has been meteoric in its lustre. Those who have not forgotten the debates on the Public Worship Bill of 1874 may just recall the Conservative Premier of the day, and part author of the measure, as having asked the House of Commons with reference to the clauses on episcopal and archiepiscopal jurisdiction not to take too seriously the gibes and flouts and jeers of which his noble friend in the Upper House, the Indian Secretary, was a great master. Only when, if ever. Lord Salisbury's private papers are published, will there be revealed Disraeli's explanation of this description pencilled roughly within a few minutes after it had been given. It was as follows: "I have just attempted a humorous apology for you in the House of Commons, and it may not read so well as I think it sounded." So ran the words of this memorable missive. The public, which, needlessly enough, had been somewhat surprised when in 1874 Lord Salisbury, retracting a vow that he was fabled to have sealed with an oath, took office for the second time under the founder of democratic Toryism, was surprised still more when in 1878 Lord Salisbury's 18 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY sympathies as a High Anglican with the Eastern Church, and with many of Mr. Gladstone's friends during the Bulgarian atrocities agitation, did not pre- vent his succeeding Lord Derby as Foreign Minister, and going together with Lord Beaconsfield to the Conference at Berlin, or sharing with him at the Guildhall the applause showered on those who brought back peace with honour from Berlin. These are the best, if not popularly the only, known episodes in Lord Salisbury's career before for the second time he became Premier in 1886. Not even in this age of biographies, written while their subjects are yet alive, has any adequate account been given of the less familiar passages in the career of this Statesman. For Mr. H. D. Traill's contribution to the Queen's Prime Minister Series is chiefly an official narrative. Yet no public man has lived in our day whose public character and doings are more deeply rooted in his private experiences. After a compara- tively uneventful, honourable, rather than brilliant, school and college course, marked amongst other things by the growth of a warm friendship between himself and the fourth Lord Carnarvon, Lord Robert Cecil, with no visible prospect of wearing his father's coronet, entered upon an exercising manhood. Its trials and struggles have made him what he is to-day. A man of capacity for private and public business, his father 19 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD was not a person of varied or elastic sympathies. Domestic shadows not a few had darkened his boyhood. Of the sunshine which softens and mellows character he had known nothing when, as a second son, on an allowance, he set out to push his way in the world, prepared to contend on equal terms with, determined to conquer if he could, his rivals, commoner or patrician. The recent discovery of Australian gold was then still glittering in the public eye. The first beginnings of the since dominant colonial plutocracy were visible in London society. Who could say that a trip to the Antipodes might not prove a short cut to the wealth which ancient descent did not in this case bring with it ? Few, if any, friends were consulted on the step. Tlie Caxtons was then a recent book. It had closed with a vision of colonial wealth from sources as yet unknown, which was to eclipse the splendour of the fortunes made as by Pisistratus Caxton and his friends from shearing of sheep. To the author of that novel, not then Lord Lytton, but an attractive figure in society and letters. Lord Robert Cecil did impart his resolve to cross the Pacific, to prospect for gold on the slopes of Ballarat. The first thing heard by his family of the enterprise was that this member of an Elizabethan house had arrived at Melbourne, and was proceeding up the country to the diggings. Nothing was authoritatively known, and very little then, of this 20 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY journey of Robert Cecil, till he reappeared in England one fine day in Oxford, and entered his rooms at All Souls', of which he was a Fellow, without attracting more attention than if he had only left them the day before. Robert Cecil, it was now rumoured, was writing for the London press, and might soon be expected to stand for one of those Midland boroughs where the influence of his kinsmen, the Exeter Cecils, prevailed. What had really happened was this. The law proved itself less to the liking of Robert Cecil than it has been since to the liking of his son. From Lincoln's Inn or the Temple to the great newspaper thoroughfare is physically as short as socially it is a natural step. Amongst Robert Cecil's contemporaries at Oxford, though not at the same college, had been one Thomas Hamber of Oriel — a contemporary at that society of Lord Salisbury's future First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Goschen. A friend of Hamber 's father had recently bought at a bargain the sister newspaper properties of the Morning Herald and the Standard. The former had been, under Maginn first, and Gififard afterwards, the chief organ of Toryism in the then imperfectly developed press of London. The Standard had been best known as an evening and cheaper supplement to its more stately and costly relative, the threepenny Herald. The new proprietor of the Standard was no common man. Of Scotch extraction, but of long conversance with London 21 PERSON'AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD business, James Johnstone lacked no quality needful to the conversion of his new possession into a big estate. Thomas Hamber had shown great cleverness at Oxford, though not chiefly in the literary studies of the place. He had, however, taken an Honorary Third Class, the class of Cardinal Newman, of Whately, and Archbishop Thomson, in the Final Schools. Since then he had studied at a German University, and as an officer of the Swiss Legion had done some soldiering in the Crimean War. Naturally therefore Lord Robert Cecil communi- cated with his old acquaintance in his new position ; for Hamber had by this time settled down from his wanderings in London. He had in fact been installed by his father's friend in the editorship not only of the struggling Standard, but of the well-established Morn- ing Herald. Leading article writers of Lord Robert Cecil's calibre and varied acquirements and experi- ences, not common even to-day, were quite unknown on the London press then. Knowledge is power in newspaper offices as elsewhere. The acquaintance with life ; the knowledge of the way in which history is made ; the insight into the motives of the men who make it ; these even more than their incisive diction were the qualities which made Lord Robert Cecil's articles valuable. Tliey largely helped to make the paper in which he wrote. At all the international crises during the Palmerstonian era, especially the years 22 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY 1856-57, and the domestic or foreign consequences arising out of the Eastern War, the Indian Mutiny, or out of the events contemporary with these. Lord Robert Cecil's pen was almost daily employed on the newspaper which then, as now, issued from Shoe Lane. Thither on his road to interview his editor with respect to the topic for daily treatment, Robert Cecil from his Piccadilly chambers used regularly to go. Other matters may at different times have taken him east of Temple Bar. The business '"aptitude since shown by him as chairman of the North - Western Railway, enabled him even in those days to save by his presence on the Directing Board more than one enterprise from the professional wrecker. But although, before as Premier he first dined at the Guildhall, the former Robert Cecil was no stranger to City doings, he had never been conversant with them to at all the same extent as many other among his contemporaries of the peerage. Meanwhile he had been returned for the Bui'ghley borough, as it then practically was, of Stamford. Parliamentary affairs left him small time for City activities; especially as his literary occupations increased rather than diminished. In 1856 one of his connections by marriage, the descen- dant of a Dutch house of great wealth, Mr. Beresford Hope, had founded the Saturday Beview. With its editor, John Douglas Cook, Robert Cecil had previously 23 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD had dealings on the extinct Morning Chronicle. By a noticeable coincidence, two of the future Lord Salis- bury's chief opponents were engaged on the same journal at the same time. Mr. John Morley wrote two articles every week ; Mr. Vernon Harcourt, who had been introduced by Sir H. S. Maine, frequently wrote the same number. As had been the case on the Standard, so on the Saturday Review, Robert Cecil's articles were practically always on foreign politics. Never before had the occasion been supplied by the press of first directing the attention of the Court to a writer who was afterwards to be Prime Minister. Late in the fifties the Times' persistently attacked in a series of articles all Prussian things and persons, greatly to the annoyance of the Prince Consort and those about him. Then it was that, as is recorded in Sir Theodore Martin's biography, the Saturday Revieto wrote on the other side, exposing the sophistries, and denouncing the prejudices of the daily journal. This article showed a special knowledge on the part of its writer which at once attracted attention at Windsor. The Prince Consort read it, heard what was said about it, gradu- ally learnt its reputed author to be Lord Robert Cecil. Lord Salisbury, with Canning before him, cannot be called the first Premier who has combined in his day professional writing with responsible statesmanship. But Canning's pen was limited to the Anti-Jacohin 24 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY or the Quarterly Beviciv. Disraeli had written novels and pasquinades. His connection with the Representative newspaper is now known on his own authority, and that of Mr. Murray who published it, to have been a myth. Lord Palmerston wrote, but not with his own hands, occasional articles in the Morning Post. John Bright himself contributed many to the old Morning Star. He showed all an author's pride in talking about them. But Lord Salisbury is the earliest instance of a journalist regularly retained on a daily and weekly newspaper who as yet has become First Minister of the Crown. Disraeli, who knew everything about everybody, was not ignorant of these antecedents of his most brilliant colleague. They are not, however, in- corporated in the sketch of Lord Salisbury that may J)e seen in the last novel of Lord Beaconsfield. The mortified politician "who thought he would take ' India,' but who only got a second-class clerkship for his son in Somerset House " (that son being Endymion Ferrars), in his prosperity gave his wife many presents in his adversity largely supported his household by cheques from that periodical, " the organic law of which was payment to all contributors, peer or com- moner, rich or poor." This portrait, however, contains no touch to indicate that Mr, Ferrars or his noble original had ever made any of the experiences of Pendennis his own. 25 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD From his infancy, therefore, down to his succession to his father's title in 1868 as the result of his brother's death, the discipline to which events had subjected him, and the vicissitudes of his unexpected fortunes, comprised a series of contrasts more startling than many Englishmen, born in a high station, destined by their abilities to attain the highest office, have ex- perienced. Here, again, an analogy which no one has yet observed, may be traced between Benjamin Disraeli and Robert Cecil. The prediction that the Jew attorney's clerk, the tawdry and rather ludicrous dandy of the Vivian Grey epoch, would become the chief of the most aristocratic party in an eminently aristocratic country, and the Prime Minister of the greatest Empire in the modern world, would not have seemed more improbable or rash than that a younger son who for years eked out his allowance by the wages of his pen, suddenly succeeding the presumptive heir- ship to his father's estate and title, should eventually be the only English statesman who by uniting the roles of party leader, Prime Minister, and Foreign Secretary, should concentrate in himself a power greater than belonged to Beaconsfield, or than before him had belonged to the elder or younger Pitt, to Peel, or to Palmerston. But however, prosperously a man may issue from such an ordeal, he can no more come out of it morally scarlcss than the soldier who, 26 FIWM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY carrying from a hundred fights almost as many surface wounds, can expect years after to find himself uncica- triced. From first to last Lord Salisbury has made good his position, not by ancestral advantages, but by personal conquest. He owed nothing to his courtesy title when he won his earliest triumphs in Fleet Street as a writer for the press. He became Foreign Secre- tary under Lord Beaconsfield because beyond compari- son he was the ablest of that statesman's colleagues, and knew more of foreign politics. Nor, it should perhaps be said, was there any consistency in his taking office a second time under the parliamentary leader from whom he had dissociated himself in 1867. The single issue on which in that year Lords Carnarvon and Cranborne left the Derby-Disraeli Cabinet was electoral reform. Household Suffrage, it is now known, was primarily the work not of Mr. Disraeli, but of his brilliant chief, who was nearly the sole survivor of the Grey Government which passed the 1832 Reform Act, who took a personal pride in crowning the edifice and a sporting pleasure in " dishing the Whigs." Robert Cecil's earlier speeches in Parliament and political writings in the Oxford and Cambridge Essays disclose no great divergence of view from Disraeli. When, therefore, the fourteenth Lord Derby, the Lord Stanley of 1832, had gone it was the most natural thing in the world that two men who in respect of intellect had so 27 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD much in common between them, who, in their political .opinions, both optimistic and pessimistic, showed so much of mutual resemblance, should come together. It is this combination of two antagonistic feelings — his identification of himself with two opposite points of view, that of the optimist and pessimist — which explains much that is mysterious in the utterance and perplexing in the policy of Lord Salisbury. By temperament Lord Salisbury is neither an unkindly nor an ungenial man. By experience, he has learnt the need of tempering an amiable trust in his fellow- creatures with a self-defensive cynicism. He never makes a speech of any importance which does not show in equal proportions the mental traits of the old Saturday Bcvieiver, and the patriotic instincts inherited from the Cecils of Queen Elizabeth's day. Thus it is that the patriot alternates with the opportunist — the leader of men who inspires, with the official who does not act because he still counts the cost. Lord Salisbury's career has thus always tended to display an intellectual antinomy. His earlier speeches in the House of Commons were full of practical sympathy with the needs of the working classes. He supported legislation for increasing the opportunities of the masses to make their voice heard at General Elections by substituting voting papers for actual presence at the ballot boxes. He proposed and carried many im- 28 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY provements in the reformatory system. But about the same time as his fellow-contributor to the Saturday Bevieiv, Mr. John Morley, Lord Salisbury came under the influence of the political philosophy of Voltaire, whom, like all men of letters, he had studied as a master of style, argument, and satire. The Gladstonian formula, " our own flesh and blood," summed up at this time the rights of the unrepresented classes. It drew forth from Mr. Lowe the classical denunciations of democracy, and from Lord Cranborne certain incisive but restrained observations on modern views of repre- sentative government. Such a Government found no favour with Voltaire, who, as well as Rousseau, had had his part in helping on the French Revolution. Lord Salisbury's attitude, therefore, towards popular privi- leges or rights in politics is not, nor ever has been, that of a haughty noble animated by the distrust proper to his order of his inferiors. Rather has it been the temper of an intellectual and literary critic who exercises his right to test the value of popular traditions in politics before embodying them in his creed, and who refuses to echo the cuckoo cries of party. On that claim he had acted during the first years of his parliamentary career, when in 1856 he differed from his leaders as to the expediency of Mr. Roebuck's Crimean resolution, and brought forward as an amendment the previous question. For though a 29 PERSON'AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD party chief, Lord Salisbury is not in the conventional sense of the word a party man. Here was the one point which he had in common with Lord Randolph Churchill. Two ideas consistently held may be traced among the confusions and eccentricities of the younger politician. One is the mischief of perpetuating party epithets and nicknames which coiTespond no longer to political realities. The other is the wisdom of extend- ing self-government to every department of national life. In both these respects Lord Salisbury has shown the influence of the younger man, who during their Cabinet associations was described by him as producing the irritating effects of a " seton at the nape of the neck." During his earlier leadership of the party, with Sir Stafford Northcote as lieutenant in the House of Commons, Lord Salisbury was supposed to be the obstacle to the adoption of the tactics favoured by the democratic Tories. The real objection came, as is now known, not from the Conservative chief but his second in command. The most convincing proof of this has since been furnished by the arrangements under which Lord Salisbury remains at the head of an Unionist Administration. When in 1886 at Manchester Lord Randolph Churchill first proposed the Unionist alliance, Sir Stafford Northcote did not disguise his disbelief and dislike of the plan. Had he remained a power in the Tory councils it would never have been adopted. 30 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY Lord Salisbury, however, showed from the first an open mind on the subject. A few full and confidential interviews with the then Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain convinced him alike of the good faith of these politicians, and therefore of the practicability of the scheme. Here it is easy to see how what may be called his pessimism was of practical service to the man. Filled with veneration for representative govern- ment, as scarcely less heaven-sent than hereditary kingship, Sir Stafford Northcote shrank from the idea of sinking the differences of party, traditionally held to be essential to representation, much in the same way that his historical conscience condemned the coalition of Fox and North against the second Pitt. To Lord Salisbury, parliamentary rule and the arrangements growing out of it were hedged by no sort of divinity. That in its day the system had been inevitable, had even done good work, he agreed with the late J. A. Froude in thinking. Like Froude, too, he may have inclined to the belief that the country and the empire have exhausted the blessings of parlia- mentary and representative rule. No scruples growing out of its sanctity prevented him from modifying its operations. If in some respects his distrust in its power for good exceeded that of some among its friends, he was consoled by other reflections which did not perhaps occur so powerfully to them, and which 31 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD intellectually were not altogether complimentary to his countrymen. The English democracy has always shown itself different from the French in its imperviousness to new ideas. The social state of things by which in this country the upper classes in the practical details of daily life get their own way works upon the whole so well as not to be in danger of any organized attack from below or from outside. Intellectual convictions on public affairs have their proper place in scientific treatises on the subject. Something of a more loose and accommodating sort is needed for application to the every-day business of the State. So too thought, in such spirit acted, Benjamin Disraeli. So thinks, so acts his erewhile restive and complaining colleague, but now loyally disciplined follower. To the charge of surrendering Conservative principles. Lord Salisbury might fairly reply that since the people became supreme in England, such principles have not been known to his party ; that it is the day of expediencies and compromises, and that if these can be manipulated so that he and his friends hold absolute power, and the kingdom comes by no special harm, it is difficult to see who can reasonably complain. Thus the mutually antagonistic principles of political optimism are tempered in Lord Salisbury by a general faith in a political providence overruling for national good alike the far-reaching mistakes of governors, and the short- 32 FROM ROBERT CECIL TO LORD SALISBURY lived infatuations of governed. This is not the Robert Cecil whom Westminster once knew. But it is such an adaptation of him as a moderate knowledge of the laws governing the evolution of political character might have led one many years ago to expect. Whether he has reached a final stage in his development in the case of one so essentially the product of circumstances, the events which the future may have in store will decide. 33 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE The political alliance at the end of the nineteenth century between a Duke of Devonshire and a Marquis of Salisbury, to those at all acquainted with the personal aspects of our political history in by-gone days, recalls relations of a very different kind in the eighteenth century between the houses of Cavendish and Cecil. Unlike the Stanleys of the Derby peerage, or the Herberts of the Carnarvon, who were both Whigs before they became Conservatives, the Cecils of the Salisbury branch have throughout all gener- ations maintained hostility to Liberalism. When the Duchess of Devonshire who lives on Gainsborough's canvas, by her visits to the back streets of the precinct carried for Charles James Fox the Westminster election against Court and Crown, the Lady Salisbury of that epoch was the chief states- 34 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE woman of the Tory party, doing more than any other not only of her sex, but of her side, to hold together the followers of the younger Pitt. That these were not scattered hopelessly nor cast down desperately by the uniformly unfavourable divisions in the House of Commons during those years is largely due to the ancestress of the statesman who in 1895 became for the third time Prime Minister. Much of the influence used by the fifth Duchess of Devonshire for the Whigs between 1757 and 1806 has been revived by the eighth Duchess, even before she was known by that title, for the Tories. A parallel or a contrast might be naturally drawn between these two ladies of the house of Cavendish. Of both here- after it will be said that they were picturesque as well as puissant, gracious not less than stately, figures in the society of their day. The eighth Duchess while still of that grade, though under another title, was admired by so shrewd a judge of human nature, especially in its patrician aspects, as Benjamin Disraeli. The horoscope of social and, subject to the limitations of her sex, political supremacy drawn by him in familiar words has since been literally fulfilled. That as the mistress of Devonshire House she would detach its master from his Liberal connections in the State ; that as his Duchess she would be the " Lady 35 PEBSOXAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Paramount " of a Conservative party resting on found- ations broader than Whiggism had ever known, more democratic and cosmopolitan than had ever been shadowed forth in Conservative dreams. Such are the predictions that during his closing years Lord Beaconsfield loved to make to the few carefully chosen friends, when he, who in his own words was " intended by nature for a silent man," allowed himself the luxury of social gossip. Nor was this the only agency on which Disraeli relied for the then Lord Hartington's secession from the titular faith of his Whig ancestors. " Liberal and Turfite are a contradiction in terms." That is the way in which the founder of the modish Conservatism known to society to-day showed his consciousness of the services rendered to his party even more by the racecourse than by the hunting-field. Next to the Church and the licensed victuallers, the Tories have never known, nor ever can know, so useful an election- eering organization as that of which Tattersall's and the Turf Club are respectively the centres. Lord Beaconsfield appreciated this fact at its full value when he made Lord Bradford the Master of Horse, showed Mr. Henry Chaplin the road leading to the Cabinet, and never missed an opportunity of in- gratiating himself with the representatives of the sport which does more than anything else to merge 36 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE individual differences, and by establishing an identity of interest for those who exist for amusement, reduces all the social varieties of fashionable England to a common denominator. In their different ways, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire are at the head of this curiously complex and varied organization. At Cambridge the intellectual traditions of his house, the scientific example of his distinguished father, and a sense of the intellectual responsibilities of an aristocracy gave the Lord Hartington of those days other interests than at the neighbouring Newmarket. A very remarkable tutor of Trinity stimulated these higher aspirations. But for the counter attractions of the sport of princes and peers, the future Chancellor of his university might have come out well in the Mathematical Tripos. The interest in the study he has never lost. Some years ago when toying with paper and pencil during a dull half-hour in the House of Commons Lord Hartington was thought to be dozing ; a nearer glance showed that he was trying to write out from memory the formula of the Binomial Theorem. With slight alterations, a well-known passage in the sixth book of Plato's Bepuhlic might be adapted to the Duke of Devonshire. Socrates has been lamenting the evil influences of an untoward environment on the highest types of in- tellectual development, Alcibiades supplying the 37 434547 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD particular illustration. Under happier conditions this brilliant son of pleasure would have achieved the highest triumphs of the contemplative life. Hence the Socratic document more familiar in its Latin than its Greek dress of Corruptio O-ptimi Fessima. Applied to the head of the Cavendishes, the theory would be expressed by saying that what Parliament and the Jockey Club have gained mathematical science may have lost. That Lord Salisbury's colleague in the dual control of the Unionist connection would not end his days as a supporter of Mr. Gladstone every one with the slightest insight into public life or character was aware years, or even decades, before 1886. The personal connection between Mr. Gladstone and the Cavendish section of the Whig party had always been less close and cordial than that between the Liberal leader and the Russell wing of the Whigs. At the very moment when he denounced Mr. Parnell as steeped in sedition, the mental processes which four years later culminated in his conversion by Mr. Parnell, were notoriously to all those admitted to his confidence going forward with the statesman who had come round from Macaulay's hard and unbending Toryism by way of Irish Dis- establishment and Irish Agrarianism to the place where Grattan stood a century ago. Therefore, Lord Hartington saved his reputation THE DUKE AXD DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE alike for political sagacity and political loyalty by holding aloof from the Cabinet making of 1886, the basis of which was perfectly well known to be the concession to Ireland of a largely independent legislature. Apart from this the social agencies undermining Lord Hartington's Liberalism had, almost from the moment of his taking Liberal office under Mr. Glad- stone, been uninterruptedly at work. It is indeed doubtful whether he had ever been, in the technical sense, a Liberal at all. He first made his mark in public life by moving in 1859 the Amendment to the Address which replaced Lord Derby by Lord Palmerston. In those days the difference between the Palmerston and the Russell Whigs was identical with that separating merely titular from real and earnest Liberalism. Thus early began the subdivision of the party into the two branches which later were so prominently to be represented by a Gladstone and a Cavendish. Averse from avoidable trouble, born into a great Revolution Whig famil}^ a member as it seemed by the ordering of Providence of Brooks' Club first, of the Reform Club afterwards. Lord Hartington, who seldom moves in any direction till coerced by circumstances into doing so, fulfilled his destiny for staying during years where he had found himself at the first. 39 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Meanwhile, organic changes in the basis of Con- servatism, social and political, were going forward. Disraeli had done much to vindicate for himself and his followers the title of the popular party. His followers themselves were not slow to do more. The result has been the social supersession of an exclusive and intolerant connection by the most elastic, eclectic, all-embracing, all-enduring organization ever known in our public life. Sir Robert Peel had made Con- servatism the political faith of men of business. It remained for Disraeli to make it the principle of social amalgamation between old aristocracy and new wealth. If the Whigs had shown social wisdom ; if there had existed among them social stateswomen who combined sympathetic insight into human nature with shrewd prevision in politics, the Conservatives would not have enjoyed their easy victory. But the orange and blue faction no longer possessed diplomatic and adroit Egerias such as the fifth Duchess of Devonshire, or the Mrs. Crewe of " True Blue " feme.^ The more ambitious spirits of the middle and moneyed classes, who might have supplied the needful inspiration, were being daily annexed by the Conservatives. Contrasting the lively welcome given them in these quarters with ' "True Blue and Mrs. Crewe" was tlie orif^nnal toast at Whig dinner-tables. On this the lady improved with " True Blue and all of you." 40 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE the haughty gloom which pervaded the Whigs, soured as the latter were by political failure and social out- manoeuvring, the Conservative M.P.'s, actual or aspirant, with their panting wives and daughters, protested that for true geniality, and really gracious condescension, nothing was comparable to the old Tory families. The political pioneer of the movement had been Peel. The old aristocratic Whigs, who were his chief enemies, needed but rope enough, as he had long foreseen, to commit social and political suicide. The social efforts in the right direction of Lady Waldegrave, of at least one later Lady Holland, and of a very few others, were only the exceptions which proved the rule, isolated contrasts of social tactfulness which only threw into stronger relief the pervading unwisdom of the party that was always waiting in vain for a second Lady Palmerston, and a new edition of Cambridge House. Politically, the only Liberalism that Lord Hartington knew, was the Liberalism of Lord Palmerston, who owed office to Conservative votes, and between whom and his follower of the Cavendishes, the turf furnished a personal communion. So, socially. Liberalism to Lord Hartington meant those reunions in the drawing- rooms of Cambridge House, managed with such gracious skill as to cause each one of the hundreds who entered the saloon at the top of the staircase on the first floor to feel himself or herself to be the 41 PERSOXAL FORGES OF THE PERIOD recipient of some special compliment for some par- ticular merit whereof its possessor was not in the secret. While the aristocratic environments of Whig- gism gave place to the mixed and undistinguished gatherings of Liberalism, the new men who had bought up so many of the old acres were all enlisted on the Conservative side. The best houses, the best dinners, all the best clubs, the pleasantest parties for the play, the most agreeable suppers afterwards, were all to be found on the Conservative side. Lord Hartington was never conspicuous for those interests in scholarship, theology, or letters which ranged on the Gladstonian side the Lytteltons, the Leveson- Gowers, the Phillimores, and the Palmers. If social pleasantness be a legitimate attraction in political life, Lord Hartington, as no professor of political austerity, must have felt that social loyalty to Liberalism implied the renunciation of much which makes political life worth living. Like the clear-brained, hard-headed Yorkshireman that by original descent he is, the latter-day head of the Cavendishes had no illusions on the quality or the motives of the curiously-mixed organization with which Disraeli had identified Con- servatism under Household Franchise. He made himself at home with his new associates without surrendering any of his old prejudices against them. Nor was he at any pains to conceal upon occasion his 42 THE LUKE AKB DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE contempt for the gentility which is the most vital principle in the strangely assorted polity that stands to-day where the Tories stood half-a-century ago. Some twenty years since, the genteel constitutionalists of Mayfair were complaining of the sufferance of democratic meetings in that pleasant enclosure whose western end is nearly at the spot where once stood Tyburn tree. Lord Hartington's summing up of the merits of the controversy was bluntly characteristic of the man at his then point of development. " If," he said, " Hyde Park is to be at the mercy of a well- dressed mob during the rest of the week, I really cannot see why a mob that is not quite so well dressed should be shut out of it on the seventh day." Here sounded the true ring of aristocratic Whiggism. His new friends, who listened to the words as attentively as they did to all which dropped from his mouth, were a little pained and perplexed. They did not quite know whether to applaud the supercilious wisdom of the remark, or to resent, as they had a dim sense of its being, the personal satire on themselves. The point in common between the masters of Chats- worth and Hatfield, whereat they both found standing room, was, of course conventionally speaking, antago- nism to Mr. Gladstone and the maintenance of the integrity of the three kingdoms. These sentiments also animated, as they themselves repeatedly declared, 43 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD two of their followers so different from their leaders as Sir William Marriott and Mr. Chamberlain, who, sinking past differences and silencing old recrimina- tions, boasted of " marching shoulder to shoulder to avert the calamity of Imperial disintegration." The real attribute wherein the two men owned nearly an equal share was that good-humoured pessim- ism which from North to Melbourne, and thence to Palmerston, has been looked upon as properly dis- tinctive of British political leaders. "It does not much matter what we say or do, but we had better make up our minds to the same thing." These often quoted words of Melbourne at a Cabinet discussing grave points of fiscal policy, are exactly in that tone of fine indifference which marked Lord Salisbury's final acceptance in the Peers of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Agrarian Reforms in 1880. This is the cheery pessim- ism which comes from the philosophy of the Saturday Bevieiver, fortified by the comfortable conviction that the social status quo " will last out our time." It is the feeling of membership, not of a doomed but of an impregnable caste. That order, as these two repre- sentatives of it believed, so long as the human nature of politicians gratifies its vanity by stars, titles, and other such promotions, is pretty sure to escape any revolutionary deluge. 'i'lii; Duke of Devonshire's future is an interesting 44 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE but inscrutable, and therefore not very profitable, speculation. During the earliest eighties, as occasional leader of the House of Commons, he made a position which few of his predecessors in that capacity had ever rivalled. His demeanour then would not indeed have been tolerated in any one but the heir presumptive of a great dukedom. That social rank had already made him a notable figure in the assemblage. His incalcul- ably late entrances to the House during its sitting, his capriciously early exits, his blunt utterances in the lobby or the smoking-room, his haughty stride from the floor of the House down Westminster Hall, these things were pointed out with pride by members of the House as they indicated its notabilities to the friends whom they lionized. When the electric light was not yet in the Clock Tower, so that the rising of the Chamber did not signal itself across the Park in Piccadilly, two grooms in the Cavendish livery rode out of Palace Yard at the moment the Speaker was known to be leaving his chair for his chop. Thus were the tidings conveyed to the family cook that his lord- ship would presently be back to dinner. It was quite a feature in the popular afternoon's amusement. The Cavendish grooms were cheered alike as they entered and disappeared from Palace Yard as if they had been State equerries clearing the way for the Sovereign. When Lord Hartington changed his place as a 45 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD natural chief of the Commons for a ducal follower of a Premier in the Lords, he underwent a process of social and personal if not parliamentary eclipse. This will be best explained by the analogy of an experience common enough in private life. The schoolboy who combines headship of the Sixth Form with captaincy of the cricket, the football team, or the boats, knows he can expect no access of personal dignity when he exchanges the school for the University, and replaces the boy by the man.^ On entering on that maturer stage, his earliest feelings are likely to be those of disgusted regret for the scene of his triumphs in class and playground. Nor can he at first resign himself to the new dispensation of comparative self-effacement. During his freshman's term he makes certain bids for notoriety among his fellows. But he is no longer pitted against the comrades of a single seminary. He has as his rivals the champions of the great schools of the whole Empire. None of the old cheers come from the new audience. The young man, however, is saved by his native good sense from letting his mortified vanity betray him to social or academical shipwreck. He soon learns the lesson of the difference between the local genius of school and college. Convinced that ho can be a Crichton no longer, without any thought of applause he settles down into an ordinary but ' See Calvorley — "called emphatically men." 46 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE useful specimen of the undergraduate. He accom- modates himself to the established traditions of Oxford or Cambridge. He forswears all idea of being a leader of thought or fashion in study or in play on the Isis or Cam. Thus before his second term is over, he has settled down into a useful specimen of the average undergraduate, takes his place in his College " torpid," or fills a chance vacancy in his College eleven. These juvenile experiences are a parable setting forth the progress and the place of the Duke of Devonshire in the House to which birth had promoted him. During his earlier sessions there he showed periodical discontent at finding himself, who had so long been the cynosure and a chief in the Commons, something little more than a nonentity in the Peers. He took up his own line by way of asserting his individuality during the Parish Councils Bill of 1894. It really seemed as if, after all, he would not consent merely to say ditto to Lord Salisbury. All this, however, has proved to be merely transient unrest. The Duke of Devonshire has far too great a contempt for humbug to echo the hypo- critical nonsense about Liberal Unionists having no quarrel with Liberalism save on the single issue of Home Rule. He knows perfectly well, nor has ever made any attempt to gloss over the fact, that the break of the Devonshire Whigs with Liberalism in 47 PERSON-AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD 1886 was more complete and organic than the rupture of the Fitz- William and Portland faction with Whig- gism in 1794. Respect for his father and the Whig name kept Lord Hartington among the Liberals even after his brother's assassination and the vow he then registered of quitting what was then called his party. It was the most natural thing in the world. A few years more no one will remember that the Cavendishes were ever anything but a Tory house, just as the world has already forgotten that the Stanleys of two genera- tions since were Whigs, and that the true reason of the Herberts abjuring plain Whig principles was the omission from Lord Grey's Cabinet of the third Lord Carnarvon, who had looked to being the second in command in the Peers. Such sympathy as the Duke may have with progressive principles abundantly finds its social satisfaction in those non-political develop- ments of Tory democracy, in virtue of which the Turf has become the central point of the strangely mixed organization which to-day does not resent the slang description of smart society. The personal factor in the President of the Council of 1898 leaves, of course, room for doubt wlicther the rest of his career may not yet Avitncss a new start. To begin with grumbling discontent, to end with passive acquiescence, has been, as his earlier colleagues know, the Hartingtonian 48 THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE method. At last the point was reached under Mr. Gladstone in 1886, where passive acquiescence was changed for denunciatory secession. After three-score the development of character is but another word for the repetition in the future of its actions in the past. The Conservative influences in his private life which have placed the Duke where he is to-day, are also agencies that may very easily spur him in the future to more self-assertion than is compatible with his place as Lord Salisbury's second in command. No one therefore will be much surprised if at some future time — to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, ten or twenty years hence — a Duke of Devonshire is no longer a Conservative President of the Council, and sets up in political business on his own account. The experiences he acquires as Mayor of Eastbourne may reveal to him the possession of unexpected strength as of a following which only needs to be summoned to respond in the country. In that perhaps dubious con- tingency the Duke of Devonshire may enter upon a phase of his development which is not now reckoned with. He may seriously consider with himself whether the general resemblances between the Conservatism of to-day and the Whiggism of the time of Palmerston, as well as the national acceptance of what is still called Conservatism, do not warrant an inference of a modified revival of the Whig party in as well as out '49 E PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of office, proving no idle day-dream. Thus Whiggism, as represented by the Duke of Devonshire, may prove, for however short a time, a warming-pan for the pro- nounced Liberalism of his old Cambridge friend, Mr. Labouchere. 50 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY COMTIST contempt has not yet killed out those who believe in the anecdotal view of history. Such are the persons who hold by the maxim that if the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the course of history would have been changed. These think with another philosopher of the same school that the cause of the Persian invasion of Greece in the fifth century B.C. was a curtain lecture delivered to the great king by his queen. To such as these a little incident in the domestic economy of the Home Office between 1881 and 1883 will seem to have affected the subsequent fortunes and discipline of the Liberal party far more powerfully than any of those agencies whereof the public learns from the newspapers. At the date just named the Secretary of State was Sir William Har- court, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary was Lord Rosebery. Mr. Barnum's famous elephant divided with statesmen public attention. A resemblance was traced 51 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD between the Home Secretary and the notorious quad- ruped, whose name of Jumbo was humorously con- ferred upon the Minister with the dignified presence but rather lumbering gait. Among the staff of the Home Office there then happened to be a young Civil Servant possessing great gifts of pictorial caricature. He had occupied a few odd moments in the Under- Secretary's room by portraying the chief of the de- partment in the garb of the elephant, writing under the sketch, " The Rt. Hon. Sir William Jumbo." As a mischief-making destiny would have it, the human subject of the portrait happened to light upon the drawing. Before then the personal relations betv;een Lord Rosebery and his chief had' been less smooth than the social intimacy of the two men might have led one to expect. The caricature incident happened just before the resignation of the peer of the place he held under the commoner. A consequence more remote, as it may seem to those who like to refer great events to small causes, was the personal estrangement of the two men who were some ton years later respectively to become Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, bringing in its train all those incidents which in 189G culminated in Lord Roscbery's resignation of the Liberal leadership, after having held it in and out of office duiing about three years. THE EARL OF ROSE EERY If one is to go back for the origins of things to their germ-causes, one should refer to circumstances still more remote than those of the early eighties, the mutual incompatibility which prevented the two men now spoken of from serving harmoniously together. A Home Secretary scarcely wants as his under- secretary one who has been trained by nature and events for the place of grand seigneur. All the fairies, as in the nursery tale, seemed to surround the cradle of the future master of Dalmeny, vying with each other in the profuseness of the gifts showered on his infancy. A comely presence, potential rather than actual pleasantness of manner and tact, wealth practi- cally without limits, friends without number, social influence and opportunity of all degrees. These things were showered all too prodigally on the fortunate child. One gift, less agreeable, but not less necessary, was forgotten. As in the old tale, the sprite who could have bestowed this may have been omitted from the invited guests. The name of the one quality lacking was discipline. The sacrifice to Nemesis was the neglected function of this infancy. The malignant goddess has never forgiven the forgotten tribute. The one great misfortune which has dogged Lord Rosebery through life, is the absence, at each successive stage, of difficulties at once bracing and chastening in their influence. At twenty-one, the spoilt child of 53 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Eton and Oxford became " lord of himself, — that heritage of woe." Heir to a considerable, if not a vast fortune ; gifted with singular powers of repartee and ready humour, he was at once courted, caressed, and complimented beyond even the common lot of young noblemen who have brains. Only a marriage into a British family, not for choice of the very highest posi- tion, with the healthy friction of independent brothers- in-law and the strengthening discipline which a life of this sort usually supplies, could have saved the young nobleman from the most enervating results of pros- perity. Instead of that, he took as his wife a lady, rich beyond other heiresses, and fringed by relatives who did not feel it their mission to snub noble brothers-in-law. Not only this vast new wealth, but the powerful connection which it crowned, was now at the young man's feet. It was evidently the young peer's doom to be the victim of the caresses of fortune. The result of a ballot at the Travellers' Club alone among his earlier experiences reminded him that he was mortal. With the exception of early failure to win the Derby, the public career of the Master of Dalmeny knew no check till the General Election that turned him out of office in 1895. The cynosure of the plutocratic oligarchy into which he had married, Lord Rosebery soon found himself the idol of the sport-loving masses. The same shrewdness that in its D4 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY combination with advantages of birth won him the notice of Disraeli and the reverence of the City, secured him, while yet a youth, the frantic cheers of the mob as well as the approving smile of sedater experts like Mr. George Payne. In 1876 good judg- ment in horseflesh, backed perhaps by luck, enabled him at a glance to detect the weak points of Lord Dupplin's Kaleidoscope, an unsuccessful favourite for the Two Thousand Guineas, and also precisely to fix its inferiority to his own Controversy. This match was run at Epsom. A few hours later he won a second match at Newmarket. Then, hurrying back to London, in the debate on the Imperial Titles Bill he delivered the speech of the evening in the House of Lords, by his forcible and witty protest against the adoption of a style that was labelled " for external application only." This triple triumph was really in its way comparable with Sheridan's two-fold success of the great speech in the Warren Hastings trial at Westminster Hall and his summons before the curtain at Drury Lane as author of the School for Scandal a few hours later. Incidentally, it may be said, Lord Rosebery's connection with the Turf has been uniformly creditable, even when it was not brilliantly successful. He has owned racehorses since 1868 ; his first venture being called by the same name as that of the later winner of the Derby — Ladas. The most important 55 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD incident in his earlier Turf days is scarcely known, and very nearly led to the severance of his connection with it. He owned two famous thoroughbreds in Mavela and Lady Beaconsfield. The performance of the former at Stockton disappointed the owner, and produced angry complaints from a mortified speculator, involving an imputation on the conduct of Lord Rose- bery's stable. He at once advertised his horses for sale, but the charm of the sport, perhaps, as he himself has said, " the hope of still owning the horse of the century," proved irresistible ; the threat of retirement was not completed. The powerful inspiration of the domestic claque ex- pressed itself in the acclamations with which, first in 1886, when he replaced Lord Granville ; secondly in 1894, when he became master of a Cabinet of his own, Lord Rosebery was greeted as a heaven-born Foreign Minister. Unlike some of his public contemporaries, Lord Rosebery has been a newspaper reader. At his most exalted moments it might have been well had he followed the alleged example of Mr. Balfour and the real one of the Duke of Devonshire of total abstinence from the contemporary records of the world's movements during the past four-and-twenty hours. In language which would have been unmeasured if applied to Chat- ham, to Pitt, or Canning, and by common consent ludicrously exaggerated if used about a Palmerston or a 56 THE EARL OF FOSE EERY Beaconsfield, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily News conspired to proclaim him the greatest British master of the arts of the diplomatist. The truth is that, instead of being what he never professed, Foreign Secretary by Celestial nomination, Lord Rose- bery remembered the description of himself as " a very painstaking man," given by Charles Fox, and made his mark as the most industrious Foreign Minister of our day. No pains were too great to acquaint himself with all the details of our foreign relations. Rightly, therefore, as well as naturally. Lord Rosebery impressed every one with a sense of his activity and zeal. His judgment of men and of events has not been calculated to inspire unbounded confidence. If indeed Lord Rosebery can rightly be said to have a foreign policy of his own, it is that which he has adopted fi-om Prince Bismarck, whose attitude to foreign states has been marked by a wish to play off France against England, and to deal with this country by means of alternate blandishments and snubs. Lord Rosebery the diplomatist cannot properly be understood without remembering first that he is a man of strong racial prejudices, specially ready to assert themselves as against France. Above all, too, has he throughout his life, private or public, been a courtier. Among the Court traditions of foreign policy a place must be given to the Teutonic sympathies which centred round 57 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Prince Albert. That by Court favour Lord Rosebery succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Premier is untrue. He had indeed been notoriously acceptable at Windsor during many years, as he had also been Mr. Gladstone's own nomination. When in 1893 that statesman had decided to resign, his more authoritative followers declared it would be indecent to take any early steps to fill the vacancy. No meeting of the party was therefore held. No opportunity of the free expression of opinion was allowed to Liberals, either in the provinces or the capital. The articulate portion of the Liberal press clamoured with one accord for Lord Rosebery, the titled Radical and democrat, as against Sir William Harcourt, the Whig commoner. If the supporters of the latter had commanded any party organization or press utterance, no one doubts that Sir William Harcourt, and not Lord Rosebery, would have received the summons to Windsor. Certain notions relating to the external policy of this island may be claimed by Lord Rosebery as his own. Yet it is doubtful whether even here his ideas do not represent rather a pious opinion than a practical creed. One of the earliest of well-born and wealthy Britons to include the Colonies not less than the United States in the grand tour, as it is now under- stood. Lord Rosebery has long identified himself with the advocacy of what is vaguely called Imperial 58 THE EARL OF ROSE BE RY Federation. He has indeed been far too shrewd to attempt the reduction of that doctrine to categorical terms. Of late, too, he has realized what many sensible men have long since perceived — that the less defined the bonds uniting the mother country and her dependencies, the stronger those bonds are, and that any attempt to draft an Imperial constitution is fore- doomed to failure. This gradual conviction of the peculiar blessings which have resulted from Imperial self-rule, explains Lord Rosebery's tepid adoption of Irish autonomy, or rather, of a federal scheme for use within the four seas, and specially applicable to Ireland. This in his view would be merely the ap- plication nearer home of the independence already enjoyed by the outlying portions of the British Em- pire — a policy justified by the aristocratic Whig name of Durham, who in this connection might be claimed by Lord Rosebery as his political ancestor.^ His interest in these Greater Britains was, at least in its beginnings, that of the observant traveller. Immediately after leaving Oxford, he travelled with Lord Bute to the uttermost limits of Europe and of the Nearer East. On his return to England, he started ^ The Durham Report, after the Jamaica rebellion, 1837, first formulated these principles, long since applied to the administra- tion of our great Colonies, and might almost be called their Magna Charta. 59 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE FERIOD on his own account to America. In New York his name is still remembered as a synonym for all that is amiable and accomplished ; the clever verses ad- dressed by him to Mr. Samuel Ward — the Uncle Sam of two continents — the hero of Welcker's and Del- monico's, the king of the lobby at Washington, and of gourmets at New York, are to be found enshrined as a classic in the scrap-book that lies on the table of every modish drawing-room in the United States. His Transatlantic celebrity suggests not only a passing chapter, by which he will always be remembered, in Lord Rosebery's career, but an enduring work of inter- national usefulness which, during many years, he per- formed, nor has yet relinquished. The fashionable American, domesticated to-day in so many Mayfair drawing-rooms and pleasant country houses, may almost be claimed as socially the creation of Lord Rosebery. The list of intellectually famous Anglo- Saxons from the States visiting this country began with Washington Irving. It has been continued by a long line of illustrious successors, of whom the United States Ambassador in 1898, Mr. John Hay, was not the least typically distinguished. As in the case of the Duke of Devonshire, so in that of Lord Rosebery, every form of social pressure during many years was brought upon him in the Conservative direction. The mission of the Turf in recent days is 60 THE EARL OF ROSE BE RY to convert languid Liberals to the realities, if not the name, of Conservatism. Lord Rosebery was prevented by his love of originality from joining Lord Salisbury when he declared the leadership of his party to be vacant. When they were both active Liberals, Lord Hartington consulted no peer on his own side so often or so confidingly as Lord Rosebery. Will the two men, long severed by Gladstonian Liberalism, now draw closer to each other, and to Lord Salisbury ? The master of Dalmeny has renounced the Radicalism which his patrons of the Daily Chronicle put him into office to promote. He has not merged his individuality as a bright and witty Whig peer in the conventional Conservative nobleman who is as common in Pall Mall as the clubs themselves. Whether there be any place in our political system for a public man of that order remains to be seen. The next General Election will not of itself give the answer. That will be forthcoming soon after the reconstituted House meet at West- minster. Some mode then of common action inde- pendently of a Tory Premier on the part of Lord Rosebery or the Duke of Devonshire is conceivable enough then. The discipline which earlier fortune denied may be granted by later experience. In 1898 Lord Rosebery is still politically a young man. After a fresh period of training a new chapter in his career may open. He may show himself to have matured 61 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD from a rather raw specimen of the grand seigneur into a mellowed man of the world. His satellites may have been discarded. The faults of manner bred of long contact with professional sycophants may have disap- peared. The spoiled child of fortune arrived at a chastened maturity, may yet fulfil all the promise of which he has ever given signs. In the Imperial politics of Great Britain Lord Rose- bery, as has been just hinted, has perceived his mis- takes with respect to Federation, and has retraced his steps. That he should for a moment have been be- trayed into the error is the more strange because he has himself visited the Colonies. He ought, therefore, to have known the certainty of New South Wales and Queensland refusing to entertain the Federation pro- ject. His besetting weakness is a readiness to be con- vinced by the arguments of those who may chance for the moment to have his ear. His misconceptions on the subject just named can only in fact be explained on the hypothesis of the diggers or miners and their organs pre-occupying his mind at one season of his tour. When his career has advanced one or two stages further its retrospect will show the whole of that period now under consideration, both from the colonial and foreign point of view, to have been one of ferment or transition. Popularly Lord Rosebery's best known tribute of admiration for Bismarck's diplomacy has 62 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY been his purchase of the original drawing of Sir John Tenniel's fine cartoon, Droppiiig the Old Filot. By this time the purchaser of that work of art will have revised his notions of Bismarckian statesmanship ; he will have seen that the great Chancellor is by no means anti- French in his general ideas. Thus, when Jules Ferry was Premier in the Republic, Bismarck and he co- operated admirably. Nor, though the British Court might sympathize rather with German Monarchists than with French Republicans, is it true that this Court is permanently anti-French. France is not a power with which it is easy to have firm relations. But during the period when such relations were helped by events, at the beginning of the reign of Napo- leon III., the Sovereign, the Consort, and all their entourage, showed no German or anti-Gallican sympa- thies. Notwithstanding the Prince's passing annoyance, recorded in Sir Theodore Martin's Life, with newspaper attacks on Prussia, English amity with France remained unclouded till Napoleon himself excited the suspicion of the English masses by apparently hostile designs, as well as alienated an important section of English statesmen by the annexation of Savoy and Nice. The truth seems to be that the foreign sympathies of the English Court are liable perpetually to transforming agencies from without. The Georgian Court un- brokenly was less Prussian than Hanoverian. Since 63 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the Prince of Wales's marriage one section of the Court, Marlborough House, has been, and is, Danish ; but whether the original cause of the sentiment belongs to Hanover or Denmark the resulting sympathy is equally anti-Prussian. Meanwhile, the Queen shows her diplomatic conservatism by continuing to send Garter missions for the bestowal of that Order to Saxony and other German states. The perpetuation of that usage tends to produce friction between our- selves and the German Empire. Add to this the suspicion or conviction that William II. is promoting a coalition against England, and that the Heir Appa- rent, now Prince of Wales, knows he may some day have to fight his imperial nephew, but has, on the whole, less reason to anticipate such a collision with France. With such flicts before him as these, Lord Rosebery, the foreign statesman, can only yet have reached an early point of his evolution. While he must be acquitted of responsibility for prolonging' the Arme- nian horrors, his record is less clear on one or two other historic points. These cannot be understood without incidentally recapitulating some of the recent episodes in South African history, which affect the credit of Conservative not less than Liberal diplomacy. The object of British statesmanship in the better known parts of the Dark Continent has, of course, 64 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY been to keep France off the Nile. In his desire to do that, Lord Rosebery leased to the Congo State a long strip of territory between that State and the Egyptian river. This strip lay in that portion which had once been Egyptian. It was notorious that France could never acquiesce in British pretensions to such morally proprietorial rights. As a fact, the concession was immediately followed by the application of such French pressure at Brussels as to leave the King of Belgium no alternative but to renounce his lease. Here Lord Rosebery did, or said, nothing, doubtless because nothing could be said or done. Such inaction does not diminish the mistake of granting a lease which he should have known the French would directly denounce, and which, as he should have foreseen, could only have the effect of making our diplomatic position worse than it was. That detail of this diplomatic transaction must not be confused with the lease to the Belgium monarch of a separate point nearest to Uganda for his life only, as sovereign of the Congo State. Here there was no question of intercepting a French route. The step called forth, therefore, no French opposition ; the place itself has since become virtually a part of the Congo State. Again, the diplo- matic controversy concerning the famous Cape to Cairo road is now ancient history. By an agreement of 1890 with Germany, known as the Zanzibar-Heligoland 65 F PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Agreement, a new concession was made by Lord Salis- bury, in virtue of which the British flag was hauled down in Heligoland. That portion, however, of this convention which related to Zanzibar and its interior was really of older date. It was in fact a confirmation of promises made by Lord Salisbury in 1886, to recog- nize the sham treaties concluded by the adventurous and now disgraced Dr. Peters. Lord Rosebery tried to qualify or to neutralize Lord Salisbury's concessions by leasing a strip of land through the Congo State frontier nearest to Germany so as to place the road and the telegraph under our administration. This was the quid pro quo given by the Congo State for the lease already named, and cancelled by French influence. This part of the arrangement was denounced by Ger- many, as the other portion had been by France. In all these proceedings Lord Rosebery acquiesced. He thus neglected the philo-Belgian traditions of British policy, in that he remained a passive spectator of the tearing up of the two parts of the international instru- ment, the one by France, the other by Germany. His answer would of course be that the real harm — if such a word be applicable to British interests in this part of the world — had been done by Lord Salisbury ; that he himself, with insufficient moans at his disposal, tried unsuccessfully to undo the mischief which had in effect been done by his predecessor. 66 THE EARL OF ROSE BE RY If, therefore, Lord Rosebery is to be remembered as a great not less than a painstaking Foreign Minister, it must be by achievements which are yet in the future. What no one will deny is that when he succeeded Mr, Gladstone in 1893, Lord Rosebery made generally fewer mistakes, and not more enemies than would have been done by any other Premier peer not in the first instance called to the party leadership by the unani- mous wish of his followers. He was, too, confronted by a colleague and rival of greater ability and experience, who represented the views of the powerful section com- mitted against the headship of the Liberal party by a member of the Upper House. Lord Rosebery's failure, so far as failure it can be called, is less the consequence of his own flexibility or feebleness than of the freak of destiny placing fortune's favourite in an impossible position. A democratic leader, wedged inextricably into an aristocratic house is as much a contradiction in terms as an anti-monarchical king or an Erastian primate. In the former case the royal anomaly runs the course of Philip Egalite, and ends at the guillotine. As for the Liberal prelate, the example of the present occupant of Augustine's chair shows his inevitable tendency with each year to grow Anglicanis ipsis Anglicanior. The antinomies, social and political, whereof Lord Rosebery has been the sport, have shown their influence in his personal bearing. On a con- 67 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD genial platform, on his feet in the House of Lords, when he is in the vein, and over a subject which gives scope to his combined powers of verbal playfulness and social banter, Lord Rosebery is as pleasant a young nobleman as one would wish to meet in an afternoon's march from Piccadilly to Westminster Bridge. His self-consciousness, though often meritoriously struggled against, prevents his attaining to the perfect ease of bearing which makes its possessor and those about him mutually at home. His talk abounds in what Mr. Disraeli called " intellectual sixpences." That is good so far as it goes. It is a slender capital on which to achieve power in the present or fame with posterity. So provisional must any estimate of the public man now under consideration be as to tempt one to substi- tute for the wordy detail of such an attempt Cicero's reason borrowed from Aristotle for the unsuitability of politics to boys: De pueris haud loqiiimur; non dum cnim res sed &pes est. 68 THE PARTY OF TWO SIR CHARLES DILKE, MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN During the years which immediately preceded the Gladstone Administration of 1880, the most notable of the lesser combinations in the House of Commons was that which its members called correctly a " party of two." The Fourth Party, though its normal strength (Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Balfour, Sir John Gorst, Sir H, D. Wolff securing its name) numerically fluctuated from time to time with the occasional withdrawal of Lord Salisbury's nephew, or its precarious reinforcement by the Duke of Northumberland's son, always lacked fixed limits. The "party of two" never varied. It was composed only of Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke. Since the days of the younger Pitt and Henry Dundas parliamentary life had been without any such instance of personal attachment and social intimacy. 69 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The two men drank out of the same cup, ate at the same board, stayed in each other's houses when they had occasion respectively to visit London or Birming- ham; took their continental holidays together in the autumn ; were always invited by Mr. Jowett to Balliol at the same week's end, were ushered mechanically by the railway porter into the same coup6 ; found them- selves seated side by side at all public functions, in- variably w^alked home or drove home together to Wilton Place and Sloane Street after the night's debate. Yet they had not been boys together; their social and personal antecedents or experiences were widely different. The alliance had its origin in a com- mon conviction on public affairs. It was cemented by impartial antagonism to an identical individual, summing up in his own person one and the same cause. The pair had made each other's acquaintance in the stormy days of the Education disputes of 1870, and in the earliest days of their intimacy were animated by a combined disapproval of the historical compromise from the first advocated, at last effected, by W. E. Forster, Mr. Chamberlain was chairman of the executive committee of the long since disbanded Education League. Sir Charles Dilke was President of the London branch of the same body. Both went with the Welsh Nonconformists for secular education undertaken by the State, for religious teaching to be 70 THE PARTY OF TWO left entirely to denominational ministers out of school hours, and to the Sunday schools. The popular voice of the Midland capital further declared for Bible reading without note or comment, Mr. Chamberlain may have agreed with Sir Charles Dilke in considering this to be absurd, but he went with his local majority. He was therefore chosen as the best man to go up to convert London. He went, but did not convert ; but he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Dilke. The friendship grew to the maturity already described. From those days the Chelsea baronet was always the guest of the Birmingham statesman on his Midland visits ; his little boy often staying in the Chamberlain nursery; Mr. Chamberlain himself, till he became a Cabinet Minister and was privately established in Princes Gardens, always found a home for the time at 76, Sloane Street. That is the little stage on which were enacted some of the most important of the un- recorded incidents in the drama of the formation of the Liberal Government of 1880. The two friends had entered into a mutual compact that they would neither of them take part in the new Administration if the other were left out, or if one did not receive a seat in the Cabinet. Mr. Gladstone, always conservative in his official notions over going back to Peel precedents, pathetically protested against the promotion per saltum, of a private member to the Cabinet. Mr, John Bright, 71 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD then the other Birmingham M.P., as a Radical whose staunchness and experience must have weight with these two young and intractable democratic bloods, was called in to win them over to the Gladstonian view. In reply, he was reminded that Mr. Gladstone, who began his official life roundly at the tender age of twenty, who had scarcely ever been out of it, was not quite the person to object to the conditions which these two very indispensable followers of his had chosen to make. During the spring weeks in which these negotiations were going forward, many messengers, many hansom and brougham coachmen passed their time hastening to and fro between Sloane Street, the Reform Club, Carlton Terrace (Lord Granville's), and Mr. Gladstone's temporary abode. Each of the " party of two " was perfectly loyal to his comrade and reasonably unselfish. Neither wished to be imprac- ticably unaccommodating. When matters so turned out as to point to the choice of Mr. Chamberlain for the Cabinet as Minister of Trade, Sir Charles Dilke, so far from pressing any claim of his own, not only acquiesced in but actually anticipated that solution of the difficulty. This summary of mere facts disposes of the state- ment that Mr. Chamberlain entered the 1880 Cabinet by some special grace of Mr. Gladstone. He found his place in it because he was the most widely repre- 72 THE PARTY OF TWO sentative of the advanced Liberals in the House of Commons. Between the Premier and himself there could be no question of gratitude. No favour had been suggested, asked for, given or received. If the Birmingham statesman could be considered indebted to any other agency than that of his own eminence and influence, this indebtedness was to Sir Charles Dilke for his honourable adhesion to a private under- standing. Unless the two men had been thoroughly true to each other, one, probably both of them, would have been elbowed out, and the 1880 Government have resolved itself into a Gladstonian dictatorship, decorated with Whig dummies as compliments or sops to the aristocracy. Each member of this " party of two " resembled his fellow, was fortunate in the fact of having come to the front in the fulness of the time, and at what is called the psychological moment. Both were the expression of forces long at work. Each embodied in his way the result of the movement long in course of preparation, but that if pressed forward earlier would have mis- carried. Sir Charles Dilke was indeed first known from his association with an amiable but mistakenly democratic friend in a parliamentary fiasco, big with sound and fury against the Throne, but ending in a laugh all round. Then it was that Mr. Disraeli, after having heard Sir Charles Dilke's advocacy of his 73 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD friend Auberon Herbert's revolutionary crotchet, in his masterly, because easy and effective reply, showed Monarchy not only to be best suited for these islands, but, " for," he said, " I will use the vile epithet, as to its cost, to be the most cheap." Soon after hearing the Chelsea baronet in the House, Disraeli met him in private. Asked his opinion, he answered in his most sententious and oracular manner : " The sort of man to die a Conservative peer," A blunder, indeed. About the same time the same statesman is reported to have shown more skill of augury with regard to Mr. Chamberlain. The two men may have met in private life. There is only one house where the meeting could well have taken place ; there seems to be good reason for saying that here it never occurred. The undoubted prophet of the Conservative future of Mr. Chamberlain was as a fact the late Mr. Newdegate, whose county representation overlapped some of Mr. Chamberlain's urban constituency, and who in local Midland matters was often brought into contact with him. Newdegate had been present when, on the Prince's visit to Birmingham, 1873-4, Mr. Chamberlain, then mayor of the town, played the host, and with infinite grace conducted the Princess of Wales to her place at the luncheon-table. Said the old Tory M.P. : " It was the prettiest sight I ever saw in my life — Chamberlain I always suspected to be a born courtier and squire of 74 THE PARTY OF TWO dames; by the time he is sixty he will be working together with Robert Cecil," This prediction, now given in exactly the same words as the writer heard the speaker utter it, was based on a complete know- ledge of the man to whom it related. It was no magical divination, and would have risen to the lips of any shrewd observer of human nature, watching it under the same conditions. Newdegate had lived with many past members of the Manchester school — Free Traders and municipal reformers in the House of Commons. In his social progress through life, he had heard young men talk and eventually recant much democratic flummery. Looking at Chamberlain, he saw at once the lack of any real sympathy between Radical Cobdenites, hard as Manchester paving-stones, and this emotional, extremely impressionable dropper of a few obiter dicta with a Republican flavour. He knew, too, what the public at large did not — Mr. Chamberlain's Radicalism largely to have originated in feelings the most alive to aristocracy of any. The young man was imaginative ; the boy had been romantic and a poet. During two years at University College School, he had sat next in class to an accom- plished litterateur as he afterwards became, the worthy and brightly imaginative son of a greatly gifted father, one among the truest poets of the century, Thomas Hood. All the men of letters and mind with whom 75 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Hood associated were zealous for Radical reform as the sole method of redressing social hardships. Thomas Hood the younger, Mr. Chamberlain's school-mate, whose brilliant fun-making mischief, daring audacity fascinated all his fellows, young Chamberlain not the least, was of course a Radical at school as he posed afterwards at Pembroke College, Oxford. Captivated by the boyish brilliance of his chosen friend, young Chamberlain caught the infection of his political malady as he might have caught the measles. In the musing moments of the lad, incidents of family history deepened these sentimental impressions into what was easily mistaken for a political faith. What reader of generous sympathies has not felt honest indignation at the treatment of Nonconformists during the Restoration ; at the long imprisonment of Bunyan ; at the insults heaped in open court on Richard Baxter ? Among the non-juring clerics of that period was a member of the ancient Border family from which those who write their name as does the Colonial Secretary, and those who adopt the spelling of the owner of the Arrow yacht, are equally sprung.^ The circumstances under which he, with his young fomily, in inclement weather was ejected from his benefice were especially ' Mr. Tankerville Chanibcrlayne of Cranbiiry Park, Hants. His prenomen should, Iiowever, be written Tancarville, and is tlie Norman-French equivalent of his surname. 70 THE PARTY OF TWO odious; they kindled his sensitive and inflammable descendant, the University School-boy, to a white heat of indignation whenever he thought of them. The early developments of Mr. Chamberlain's antipathy to the principle of Church and State must be referred only to this family incident, which inspired more than one boyish speech at the debating society, but never expressed itself in the ai'ticle that his friend, the younger Hood, wished him to write for the school magazine. These experiences may be paralleled in the case of Sir Charles Dilke, like Mr. Chamberlain a man of good family descent; a younger branch of the Maxstoke Castle Dilkes of Warwickshire, possessing a pedigree traceable back without a break to the twelfth century. Ancestral forces have thus in nearly the same degree coloured characteristically the Liberalism of these two men. Municipal experience was with Mr. Chamberlain the preliminary to Imperial work. As he had pretty clearly sho^vn he intended it to be by superseding lines of parochial by lines of political division in the affairs of his adopted town. Provincial training schools had sent many capable vestrymen to St. Stephen's before Mr. Chamberlain's day. Those schools had not, however, produced any pupil who had mastered the secret of transmuting provincial activity into parliamentary and Imperial force. 77 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Sir Charles Dilke, politically and intellectually, is not less the product of his time than his friend. In his studies, his education as well as his achievements, Sir Charles Dilke represents the reaction against the old aristocratic ideas of education, or of the intellectual equipment needful for an English statesman. The classical and rhetorical training that coloured politics under Canning, Peel and Palmerston, as they had done under Pitt, produced so capable and attractive a breed of administrators that one cannot wonder passive acceptance of its virtues outlived the practical utility of its results. Not to teach boys knowledge but to strengthen their capacities for using knowledge, was the idea of sound education insisted upon by John Hookham Frere, the friend of Canning, as generally by the ablest not less than the noblest spirits of that epoch. The fourteenth Lord Derby was so fascinating a specimen of the sporting and scholarly politician, that his boast of having been born, bred, and schooled in the pre-scientific days seemed to many rightly to discredit as well as to disparage the elements of useful knowledge slowly creeping as they were into the curriculum even of the great schools. There seems no doubt that the fomiliar story is true, and that when Palmerston said : " I will take the Colonial Office myself," he really said also to Helps : " Come up-stairs and show me where some of these places are on the 78 THE PARTY OF TWO map ! " Among intellectual people, the new movement in favour of useful knowledge was of course immensely helped by the writings, the social as well as parlia- mentary example of Macaulay, who reminded his readers of their ignorance by their contrast with his own paragon of omniscience, the schoolboy who was never the pride of any actual masters, nor the terror, perhaps the victim of his youthful mates. The dis- cussions of the cheap newspaper press concurred with the growing complexity of the subject matter of parliamentary debate or of Imperial administration, to remind the rising generation of the necessity of practical knowledge as well as intellectual training. Nature had placed Sir Charles Dilke amid circum- stances specially favourable to the recognition of this contemptuously ignored and reluctantly acknowledged truth. His grandfather, always his real educator, had done much by his journal, the Athenaeum, to train the middle classes to soundness of literary judgment. He had in conjunction with Lord Stanhope, Mr. Milner Gibson, and notwithstanding the Paul Clifford lampoons of Bulwer Lytton himself, to ensure full educational value to all classes from the repeal of the Paper Duties. He was not, therefore, likely to neglect the training of a favourite grandson whose nascent aptitudes he had watched from infancy. Knowledge he saw in the coming era would be more than ever a 79 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE FERIOD power. Nothing was left undone by him to act upon that truth in the case of the child who lived in his house. At Cambridge, therefore, Charles Dilke was encouraged by his own family not to restrict his industry to the subjects of the Senate House. At Trinity Hall he won prizes and even a scholarship ; read moral sciences with Professor Mayor of John's, political economy with Venn of Caius. He worked mathematical problems in the same tutor's room as the first Lord Rothschild, who took moderate honours in the Mathematical Tripos. Judging from the places of Charles Dilke's contemporaries at the same tutor, had he gone in for honours he might have expected to come out tenth or eleventh amongst the Wranglers. His relative agreed with him in thinking travel likely to prove more useful as a training for parliament than further prosecution of studies in the exact or inexact subjects of the Senate House. At the end, therefore, of a certain May term, the young man started on his first journey round the world ; he had already travelled in Europe a good deal with his brother as an under- graduate, had marked the particular spot in Provence where he resolved some day to possess, as he now does, a house of his own. With that same brother, Ashton, whose ability impressed at Cambridge many of his friends not at all leas than that of Charles, he was in the habit of talking French — an ac(|uisition which has 80 THE PARTY OF TWO been of much use in the line he more recently adopted. It was not till 1877 that foreign affairs became specially prominent at Westminster during his day. By that time he had fitted himself beyond most of his contemporaries for Foreign Office work. The amusing Prince Florestan can scarcely have been, as some have supposed, an imitation of the Bdbagas of Sardou, because it appeared before Sardou's work. It showed an acquaintance with the local genius of foreign politics quite as much by the knowledge obviously held in reserve as by that expressed. Russia is the European country that he has specially studied. But his forte is less intimacy with the details of any single foreign State than a general knowledge of all nations beyond seas more accurate at every point than general knowledge sometimes is. As little as in the case of Mr. Chamberlain can there be detected in the case of Sir Charles Dilke traces of the culture belonging to Lord Derby's pre-scientific age. The prose of Newman consciously, that of Froude perhaps unconsciously, was modelled on the highly- wrought simplicity of the discourses and letters of Cicero. One would find as little of these influences in the perspicuous English of Dilke as of classical quotations in the speeches of Chamberlain. As a child Charles Dilke had been noticed by John Stuart Mill ; 81 G PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD as a youth he studied him ; as a man he associated with him in the light of political preceptor. The diction, therefore, spoken or written, of Charles Dilke is that of John Stuart Mill. Both members of the "party of two" leave these political teachers at the Imperial and military point. This is not the new Radicalism. It is a reversion to the old. It is the historic preference to the Liberalism of that man of the Sword and of Empire, Cromwell, rather than the Liberalism of Manchester, which did its best to beat swords into pruning-knives or plough- shares by the well-meant but ineffectual instruments of commercial treaties and international exhibitions. Neither of the men now placed in juxtaposition has apostatized from any early conviction. Both have illustrated in a way which only the short-sighted cannot have foreseen, the law of progress and develop- ment implanted in their nature or emphasized by events. Perhaps the last year of this century or the first decade of the next will show the school to which they Avill finally belong. 82 THE BROTHERS BALFOUR The genius of the House of Commons survives suc- cessive Administrations. It may be conceived of as inhabiting some chamber on the premises, and periodically dispensing of its gifts to those who wait for its inspiration. Only in the case of great leaders of men does this abstraction expend all its gifts upon an individual. Patient votaries of the power, however uncongenial their nature, and unpromising their circumstances, are seldom denied those of its endowments which a certain conjuncture demands. In 1898 the elder of the brothers Balfour perpetuates no kindling traditions of Parliament, nor, with any completeness, reproduces the traits of the more famous of his predecessors. There is little in common between him and the once typical members of the party he leads. But these types have nearly died out. Sir John Mowbray, sitting for Oxford University, at the time these lines are written is Father of the House. 83 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD He is the lineal successor in the nineteenth century of the country gentlemen who appreciated Walpole the man in the eighteenth, as much as they detested his principles or dreaded his want of them. Of the modern successor of such forerunners, nearly the last passed away when Sir Walter Barttelot of Sussex died. Should Nature ever restore this breed, she will doubtless produce another Gathorne Hardy as its natural leader. Meanwhile, under the changed conditions, the busi- ness of Conservative captaincy could be performed by no one better than by Mr, Arthur James Balfour. The tutelary divinity of St. Stephen's denied him the wealth of a Pitt, or other of the " lords of human kind," not from niggardliness, but because she saw other endow- ments would be demanded in the situation of to-day. Mental powers of the most admirable kind were bestowed upon him abundantly. He has found an intellectual basis for Church orthodoxy. Determined to put away the reproach of " the stupid party," he has flattered the whole Carlton Club in the most exquisite way by enabling it to recognize the intellectual founda- tion of its State convictions. While doing this he has been adroitly careful to avoid the mistake which a Disraelian (as he is not) might have committed, of doing all the thinking for his followers. Years ago a cultivated instinct prompted him to remember that 64 THE BROTHERS BALFOUR in parliamentary life manner is as useful as mind. A frank honhomie in some of its varieties and adaptations was the secret of the House of Commons success of a whole line of leaders on both sides, from North to Palmerston. Jaunty geniality of that sort was not to be a Balfourian attribute. "Charm of manner" is the quality which the goddess of St. Stephen's at the close of the nineteenth century saw would be most useful to the man who fills the place of Peel. This indefinable and elusive quality in Dr. Arnold's famous portrait of " that graceful figure " in his history caused Publius Scipio Africanus to be the favourite of the gods, or to be strong in the belief that he was so. It is the one endowment in virtue of which Mr. Balfour has, during now nearly seven years, held his place. The grace and dignity of a most wise as well as fond mother, to whom her sons owe much of what is best in them ; the educational example of a shrewd and chivalrous father ; in such words one may sum up the moral heritage to which the brothers Balfour were born. Never did caricaturists with pencil see so happily distinctive characteristics as in the case of these two. However absurd the position or grotesque the environ- ment, wherein it suits Mr. Carruthers Gould, or any other humourist of the pencil, to depict the statesman, the moral lineaments of the dominating attribute are 85 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD always kept in sight. In the younger brother the angularities, sometimes the tactlessness, of the Scotch metaphysician are, as truth demands, indicated in pictorial parable. With these the public has learnt to contrast the softer graces of the elder brother summed up in the familiar phrase which is yet the only one that describes the man. So unfailing is this fascination of carriage, so perfect this grace of deportment, that it is doubtful whether Mr. Arthur Balfour possesses a heart. Such an organ might in- terfere with the winning finish of his parliamentary pose. Yet the heart which is essential to the frame of man has also its uses in the organization of party. Imagine the rare result of a process fusing the natures of an Arthur Balfour and a Randolph Churchill. Mentally the two brothers are nearly equal. But with the savoir fairc of the elder a grain of genius would effect more than an ounce with the extreme fallibility of perception of the younger. That the lieutenant and nephew of Lord Salisbury should rouse enthusiasm among the public was not to be expected ; nor perhaps in his own interest to be wished. He does really a great deal more. He compels admiration. Here is this politically young man a competent successor to Disraeli ; without any of Disraeli's pride 86 THE BROTHERS BALFOUR or pleasure in his work. Mr. Balfour does that work as well as, under his conditions, it could be done by any Conservative captain. The latter-day reaction against the glorification of representative government was foreshadowed half a century ago in the novels of Disraeli. It found later and less romantic expres- sion in the writings of J. A. Froude. It was among the inspiring forces of that intellectual atmosphere in which Mr. Arthur Balfour was trained. A free and cheap press is only one of the many agencies that compel publicity in the transaction of political busi- ness. Yet the press is also the agency that would ensure representation apart from Parliaments, general elections or household suffrage. This, then, is the paradox intellectually troublesome to those who have learnt and think in the same school as Mr. Balfour — that at the very moment when representative institu- tions are the least needed at Westminster, their existence is the most inevitable, and their action the least considerate. Only a very powerful brain and an exceptionally vigilant will could enable a political thinker of Mr. Balfour's sort to discharge the business of his place quite as well as if he were a convinced parliamentarian. Sometimes, of course, a sense of the illogical absurdity of the whole situation overrules the restraining mind. Hence he has been known to refer members, who plead 87 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD absence from the House as a cause of ignorance, to the daily papers, which he does not read. Push that argument a little further. The uselessness of attend- ing the House, or of the very existence of that House, might be easily proved. From time to time conventional complaints are made against Mr, Balfour's leadership. Thus one is told that he does not live among his followers; that his speeches represent too exclusively the ideas of the inner Cabinet, and that, being superciliously out of sympathy with those about him, he is always on the eve of parliamentary defeat. This is a political com- monplace, neither less nor more true of Mr. Balfour than it has been of every foremost politician on either side and at all epochs. Lord Palmerston was periodically reproached for listening only to a chosen few of those who saw him at Cambridge House. Mr. Disraeli was alternately denounced by the Dukes for thinking of the democracy ; by the demagogues for not forgetting the Dukes. Mr. Gladstone, according to some, was always associating too exclusively with the Lytteltons and Leveson-Gowers ; and so on, and so on. No other man of his party has lived recently who could afford so well as Mr. Balfour to ignore all this nonsense. What not to do he can from looking at his brother at any moment learn. What ought to bo done, or what can be done, he now knows by intuitions of his own. Others 88 THE BROTHERS BALFOUR have led the House of Commons because they were, like Sir Stafford Northcote, the representatives of a powerful class, or like Palmerston masters of human nature. To the end of the nineteenth century it has been reserved for a keen politician, but neither a Parliament man nor a partisan, without convictions, without his soul in his business, to sway the most difficult assem- blage in the world in virtue of the most intangible of attributes. While all the parental resources were being lavished upon the training of Arthur Bajfour, domestic foresight could not anticipate that the great success of the object of this solicitude would be due to a gift that cannot be resolved into natural impulses properly disciplined by events. Charm of manner may be inherited. Brought, as in the case now spoken of it has been, to such perfection as irresistibly to fascinate foes not less, perhaps even more, than to attract friends, it will be recorded in history as a boon whose secret is known only to this possessor of it. Men have been before now governed sometimes by force, sometimes by phrases — never till Mr. Balfour's day by personal charm. Whether such superficial and exterior grace be compatible with all the interior virtues, it does not particularly concern any one to know. With his friends, intellectual power could not have been used 89 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD more happily than by impressing them, as Mr. Balfour has done, that, led by himself and by the chief of the Cecils, their title to be considered the intellectual party can be sustained against all rivals. With his opponents Mr. Balfour's manner is perhaps too perfect at all times to please his supporters. Yet but for this grace, the Unionist coalition would not have lasted so long, with a fair prospect of continuing at least as much longer. The cheery but sincere contempt for party shibboleths of Lord Randolph Churchill was needed to set the Unionist party going. Only the intellectual indifference to conventional distinctions in faith and name of Mr. Balfour; only a natural readiness to associate himself with the foes of yesterday as with the friends of long ago ; only a tact which amounts to genius, and a geniality coming not from the heart but from the head, could ensure his political partnership with Mr. Chamberlain being unruffled by any breeze of jealousy, undarkened by any suspicion of difference. As in intellectual matters, so too in political, there has never been wanting to Parliament a little band of cultivated and charming latitudinarians who, without themselves belonging to either party, combine much that is most rational and agreeable in both. Such was the little coterie to which Falkland, belonged. Of the same complexion were the political friends whom Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff impartially from both sides yo THE BROTHERS BALFOUR used to collect at Hampden, at Knebworth, at York House, Twickenham. Such was a later political society numbering Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. Albert Pell, the present Lord Knutsford, then Sir Henry Holland. Such was the company that used once to meet at Mr. Chamberlain's table, whether in town or country, Mr. Balfour himself being one of them ; than which he has probably not known any society more thoroughly congenial. If the charm of Mr. Arthur Balfour be in some sense a family heritage, the periodic outbreaks of tactlessness in his brother are also perhaps due in part to ancestral forces. Almost at the same time in the spring of 1898, Lord Salisbury was enunciating his aphorism about living and dying nations which gave offence equally to Spain and America, to Great Britain and to Turkey; and his nephew, Mr. Gerald Balfour, was mentioning the victims of Irish distress in in- felicitous juxtaposition with champagne and other luxuries of the table. Neither speaker meant to be callously contemptuous of national calamities or of foreign misfortune. It was not want of heart, but want of thought, which was responsible for the ill- advised collocation of terms. Lord Salisbury's " blaz- ing indiscretions" have in 1898 pretty well burned themselves out. His catalogue of " things one would rather not have said " is still a little too full. Perhaps 9L PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD that unfortunate aptitude may partly explain the combination in his nephews of the faculty of phrases that ought to be avoided, with so much of cleverness, and, in the case of the eldest of these nephews, with a personal charm which has passed into a proverb. 92 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT Among the extracts from the Prince Consort's diary given in the biography by Sir Theodore Martin, under the date of October 1850, are one or two whose historical interest is greater in 1898 than the diarist could at the time have foreseen. The English press was then prejudiced by the Schleswig-Holstein episode against the rising power of Prussia. The Times in particular provoked the Prince Consort to exclaim against its " abominable anti-Prussian articles " : he adds, " that of yesterday upon Warsaw and Schleinitz is positively too wicked " ; "a total estrangement be- tween the two countries may ensue if the newspaper war be kept up." As a corrective to the daily journal the Prince, writing to his daughter, the Princess Royal, then newly married to the Crown Prince, " commends to her attentive perusal " two articles in the Saturday Eeview of November 10, one upon the despatch, the other upon the hostile attitude of the Times towards 93 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Prussia. " Both," he says, " are admirably written, and deserve to be translated into German." In a despatch to Sir J. Hudson of the preceding August 31, Lord John Russell had deprecated an attack by Sardinia upon Venice, on the ground that it must bring France into the field, and so cause a general European war. In the weekly article praised by the Prince it was said: "The only reason the Times ever gives for its dislike of Prussia is that the Prussian and English Courts are connected by personalities; that British independence demands that everything proceeding from the Court should be watched with the most jealous suspicion." The article in which this passage occurs was written by the then Lord Robert Cecil. The other article, that on the text of the Russell despatch, was from the pen of the Mr. Vernon Harcourt of that day. Not often can a weekly print publish in the same number one article from the pen of a future Prime Minister, another written by a destined leader of Opposition. It is a greater rarity still to find these two compositions selected by the husband of a Queen for special mention to his daughter, a future Empress, as the best narrative of contemporary history. The connection of Lord Salisbury with the daily and weekly press has already in this volume been set forth with some detail. At the time the Schleswig- 94 sin WILLIAM IIARCOURT Holstein question agitated English opinion with the results just mentioned in journalism, Mr. Vernon Harcourt was popularly known only by name as a parliamentarian banister in large practice, and as the writer of some much-talked-of letters in the Times, sometimes signed " Historicus," sometimes by the initial " H." only, but always supporting the Russell, who afterwards became the Gladstonian, against the Palmerstonian, Liberals. From this occasional connection with the newspaper, it became the fashion to speak of Mr. Harcourt as a regular member of the Times staff. Whatever the epithet by which it may be qualified, the description is untrue. The man who leads the Liberals in the Commons in 1898 never wrote a leading article in Printing House Square; he never took the Times shilling. " When the circle of diners is laughing with Fane, And Harcourt is capping the jokes of Delane" — these lines from Sir George Trevelyan's Ladies in Parlia- ment truthfully suggest the sort of relation which existed between Delane and Harcourt. It was a social, not professional, intercourse ; the two men met habitually at dinner-tables, in drawing-rooms ; the famous editor, who had a hatred of what he called " plunging " in any form, disliked few people personally ; he was a large-minded man, with all the animus of 95 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD which he was capable reserved for some points of Lord Palmerston's policy and most characteristics of Napoleon III. Delane therefore was not likely to welcome the less warmly to the " hospitality of his columns " Mr. Vernon Harcourt because of his political sympathies. The number of men regularly retained as leader writers for the Times has been, it may as well inci- dentally be said, much smaller than may be thought. The Opeo'a Brodrichiana, which do, or did, fill a corner in the library of the Warden of Merton of 1898, contain some articles set in the leader type of Printing House Square. But his articles on subjects like the Indian Budget notwithstanding, Mr. G. C. Brodrick holds himself only to have been a supernumerary on the establishment. Since the deaths of Thomas Mozley and of Louis Jennings, Mr. Leonard Courtney, more lately of parliamentary, the Rev. H. Wace of academic, fame, are perhaps the only two survivors of those who supplied the daily leader under Delane. With the Saturday Review Mr, Harcourt was associ- ated more systematically and more intimately. At Cambridge, Henry James Sumner Maine, as an under- graduate at Pembroke — as fellow at Trinity Hall — was Mr. Harcourt's tutor. Maine's Ancient Law was not published till 18G1; its preparation had occupied many industrious years; during these the author did much 96 SIF WILLIAM HAECOURT anonymous writing. In 1846 he was enlisted on the Saturday Bevicio. The first editor of that paper, John Douglas Cook, in choosing contributors looked chiefly to the Universities or to the only two intimate friends he possessed at this time, Mr. Beresford Hope, then Member for Cambridge, and to the Peelite Duke of Newcastle. Maine, as the editor's recruiting agent, placed Mr. Harcourt in communication with Mr. Cook. The acquaintance thus begun was so productive that in these, its early days, the bulk of the paper not seldom seemed to be written by Mr. Maine's pupil, by the Rev. William Scott of Hoxton (who also acted as assistant editor to Cook), and by another brilliant Cantab, the future Sir Fitzjames Stephen. Two Oxford men were also of the same company, Thomas Collett Sandars, the future editor of Justinian, and John Morley, in 1898 of Cabinet rank, and a Liberal captain. To some degree the political fortunes, the Parlia- mentary style, and the political manner of the men now mentioned were permanently coloured by their connection with the same newspaper. Lord Salisbury's most carefully prepared speeches, his official despatches, and even his incidental notes, usually contain passages recalling the familiar style of the Saturday Beviewer of old. Even Mr. John Morley, though his Saturday days are separated by an interval of independent authorship, 97 H PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD or of Cabinet discipline, still in the arrangement of argument, the turning of sentences, the choice of epithets, shows the same qualities. During the first three decades of the Victorian age, success as a Sahirday Bcvieiuer implied more than com- mon ability. It conferred upon the person achieving it a sort of journalistic diploma. But distinction of the sort just indicated, however intellectually creditable, was not necessarily conducive to social popularity. The editor of the Saturday, rare as was his power of know- ing good writing when he saw it, was a man of studi- ously unpolished address, and almost ungovernably choleric temper. The social traditions, therefore, of the earlier school in letters of a Vernon Harcourt were not calculated to promote a reputation for social urbanity to the same extent that other sorts of worldly discipline might have done. Society reputations are at the mercy of the most trifling accidents. At one of the Saturday Review dinners held at the Trafalgar, Greenwich, Mr. Vernon Harcourt and Mr. Fitzjames Stephen were seated on chairs between which a vacancy was left for a late comer. After the meal had advanced some way, the tardy guest arrived ; he was inducted into the scat in this distinguished but, to a stranger, not congenial neighbourhood. Stephen and Harcourt, old Cambridge friends, had not met for some time ; great events were happening; the friends had much SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT to say to each other. Separated by the interval of a chair, they committed the social solecism of exchanging conversation across the unpunctual and then entirely unknown guest, although heir to a peerage. That neglected diner, however, had even in those days some social influence ; very soon afterwards he became a personage in good society. Indignant at being talked across by two strangers, he left the table. On returning to town he related his experiences with some imagined embellishments, more uncomplimentary than the truth warranted, to his nearest neighbour at table, the then Mr. Vernon Harcourt. The story constructed out of these materials with a fine fringe of malicious embel- lishment was made use of some years ago with great pertinacity to the then Mr. Harcourt's disadvantage. In the paper with which at this time he had so much to do, the Opera Harcourtiana were not exclu- sively political. All were written from the life, some- times in a vein of humour more or less autobiographical, even at the journalist's o^vn expense. Such were two compositions that, as sometimes happened in those days when popular journalism still seemed a novelty, were really the talk of the town. One of these effu- sions described Mr. Harcourt's first acquaintance with electioneering; the other, by the title Laid wp in Lavender, in a vein of good-humoured banter dealt with some aspects of the writer's old acquaintance, 99 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD William Howard Russell of the Times. The germs of more than one Parliamentary speech by the author may be found in Laid up in Lavender. In 1859, as a Liberal, Mr. Harcourt had contested the Kirkcaldy boroughs. He had canvassed the district thoroughly more than once, finding great amusement in the humorous varieties of electoral life and character. The general impression given to him was that wooing the favour of a wide constituency must be very like court- ing some capricious and " April-tempered " fair. The idea elaborated with minute parallels between the two situations formed a Saturday article, over which Mr. Douglas Cook chuckled with delight, while another of Mr. Cook's staff, Fitzjames Stephen, also with some electoral experience at Dundee and Harwich, endorsed the truth to life of the little piece. All Sir William Harcourt's public appearances have been upon Liberal platforms. The notion of his having at some time oscillated between the two parties is probably due to the flict that in the 1874 Parliament, when member for Oxford town, he, during about forty- eight hours, found himself in disagreement with Mr. Gladstone, and following Mr. Disraeli. On his first en- trance to the House of Commons, Mr. Harcourt had not the reputation of general popularity ; he was considered, to use the French expression without an English equivalent, maitvais coucheur. Conscious of this veixlict, 100 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT he determined that his M.P. era should coincide with a change in the general estimate. Returned for Ox- ford in 1868, he set to work to live down the untoward appreciation; he began by mastering sympathetically, and actively identifying himself with, his new environ- ment. From family tradition, if not personal convic- tion, an Establishmentarian, he believed that in a Protestant country, in the relations between Church and State, the secular must preponderate. That was the idea with which in 1874 Disraeli, following Archbishop Tait, made a bid for popularity with the Public Worship Bill. The subtle argument and recondite erudition of Mr. Gladstone's speeches against this measure perplexed and irritated the Erastian Philistinism that is among the deepest of Parliamentary feelings. The Liberal leader had tried the temper and wounded the self-love of his audience by reminding it of its ignorance of the subject and of the authorities canonical and legal of which Mr. Gladstone himself alone knew. When there- fore Disraeli had won an universal cheer by his phrases, " mass in masquerade," " a Bill to put down Ritualism," Mr. Harcourt, in his technical answer to Mr. Gladstone's speech, bristling with scholastic and canonical love as it did, uttered the words, " As for this Van Espen, I don't believe six persons in this House ever heard of the man ; " the point exactly hit between the wind and water of the temper of the assembly ; its applause 101 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD marked the establishment of Sir William Harcourt as a speaker who could always count on the ear of the House. Some years after this, when he had decided on his own withdrawal to the Peers, Disraeli did try to induce Sir William Harcourt to join the Conservatives ; in fact to take the leadership, which he was about to lay down. Socially and personally the two men had always been good friends, often living in a close degree of mutual confidence, constantly visiting at each other's houses. But Sir William Harcourt refused the sug- gestion point blank ; nor, save on the solitary occasion now mentioned, does Hansard record any divergence of his from official Liberalism. Why on Mr. Gladstone's retirement in 1893 Sir William Harcourt was not sent for by the Queen admits of a very easy explanation. The actual resig- nation of the old leader was only decided on after much delay; an appeal had been made to his followers not to disclose its possibility. Mr. Gladstone's own nominee, Lord Rosebery, was probably alone in possession of the secret ; Lord Rosebery 's partisans alone had their organization ready when the announcement was made. Had any meeting of the party at the Reform Club or elsewhere been held, no one doubts Sir William Harcourt would have been summoned to Windsor. It is, indeed, absurd to talk of an intrigue against Sir 102 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT William. The exceptional circumstances admitted of no successor for the moment to Mr. Gladstone but the Whig nobleman who had given so many undoubted proofs of his popular sympathies. Nor was it till some years later that a perception of the impossibility of a Liberal peer in the Upper House, and a Liberal Opposition in the Lower led by Mr. Asquith as Lord Rosebery's deputy, caused the arrangement to collapse. So long as he consents to remain where he is, Sir William Harcourt will retain his place against all comers. And that for the same reason for which no Conservative disaffection can supersede Lord Salisbury. Sir William Harcourt is incomparably the ablest man of mature standing whom the Liberals have. The knowledge which in Parliament is power, the courage, the capacity for work, the shrewdness in counsel, the quickness in reply, above all the destructive competition among several younger Liberals for which Sir William Harcourt's abdication would be the signal ; all these things make Sir William not only the most command- ing figure in the active Liberalism of 1898, but also its greatest, because its most indispensable, personal force. Mr. Asquith came into Parliament heralded by a brilliant reputation at Oxford, and the highest opinion of Sir Henry James and other not less competent experts at the Bar. His motion secured the defeat of 103 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Lord Salisbury's '86 Government, and of course destined its maker to Cabinet office. If brains and the partisan- ship of a poAverful and popular newspaper could create a party leader, Mr. Asquith would have been the Liberal generalissimo before 1898. As it is, the very highest future may yet be before him. But in another Balliol man. Sir Robert Reid, he may have an uncon- sidered and formidable competitor. At any rate, the Liberal party not being demented will remember the advice of Vauvenargues to Voltaire, to have preferences perhaps, but not exclusions. A mere sentimental antipathy or predilection will not regulate its action. And this perhaps for the reason once pithily put by Disraeli, that a party leader is chosen not at a party club, but in the country. Non- sense may continue to be talked about Sir William Harcourt's unpopularity. The very persons who talk it, if they have any knowledge of the subject, cannot believe it. Such chatter is a mere mechanical parrot cry. Men who start as barristers and, as in the case of Sir William Harcourt, the wielders of an aggressive and critical pen in the press, are sure to encounter much prejudice which they can but gradually live down. Sir William Harcourt has won many victories in his time ; none more praiseworthy than over his own personal failings, which by the way were never greater than beset the temper at times of most of us, 104 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT The House of Commons, though sometimes pre- judiced, is generally just ; its members have always known Sir William Harcourt's ability. They have long since appreciated his conquest of himself, culminating in a perfect command of temper and tongue. They have watched, too, the progressive and transforming mellowing of the man since 1868. Disraeli's parlia- mentary and party popularity only came at an advanced stage of his career. Between the development of a Disraeli and a Harcourt there is some analogy. As the constant talk about superseding the only leader of genius whom since Canning the Tories had never came to anything, so like rumours of deposing a Harcourt in favour of one among his lieutenants Avill not find their fulfilment within any period of which practical politicians need take account. 105 LORD WELBY: PERMANENT OFFICIALS, IMPERIAL AND CIVIC " He must have stepped out of the pages of The New- comes." During one of the several international meet- ings on Fiscal methods in Paris, this was the phrase in which a shrewd Frenchman, less ignorant of English letters than most of his countrymen, summed up the personality of one among the ablest as well as most typical of the permanent officials of the Victorian age. These are the servants of the Crown whom foreigners, the American Anglo-Saxon not less than Latin and Continental, regard with mixed feelings of jealousy, admiration, and despair. The servants of the Crown, who outlive party administrations, who secure con- tinuity to the business of Imperial administration, on whom the political Ministers of the day depend for a knowledge of their own work, constitute a class un- known save in name beyond the four seas. The best popular picture of this order contained in English 106 LORD WELBY letters is that of Sir Warwick Westend and his col- leagues, drawn by Anthony Trollope in The Three, Chrlzs. The name chosen by the novelist was scarcely a disguise for Sir Stafford Northcote, the pink at once of country gentlemen and Treasury chiefs. For readers of to-day this hierarchy may be spoken of as founded by Sir Robert Peel, and as trained to its present perfection by Mr. Gladstone. The services of that last-named statesman have been described by contemporary writers as chiefly moral. The account is true enough if by the expres- sion is meant that the function of a Gladstone in Liberal politics resembles that of a John Henry Newman and his friends in national Churchmanship or religion. The same sort of spiritual unction which previously had been given by Wesley to Evangelicalism, was imparted to the Oxford High Church movement of Mr. Gladstone's youth by the fellow and tutor of Oriel who successively became the Vicar of St. Mary's, the recluse of Littlemore, the oratorian of Birmingham, Cardinal of the Roman Church. The breath of the genius of John Bright touched the political school of Manchester. The matchless beauty of his simple Saxon eloquence canonized it in parliamentary records. What the earlier or born Radical did for the political system christened from his native county, that the converted 107 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Conservative, the convinced and inspired leader, ac- complished for the Liberal thought of the entire nation. By the side of this achievement must be placed his completion of the development and training of those public servants of whom Lord Welby, though techni- cally no longer of the order, is still in 1898 the best known t}^e. By death or retirement the ranks of these men are daily being thinned. Their tradition lives ; their official and personal force is increasingly being incorporated into the London, if not the Imperial, Parliament. Sir Frederick Rogers, so long the Per- manent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, had, as Lord Blachford, a place in the Upper House before he died. Since his day his old department has known several successors in his place who have not been his inferiors. Chief among these has been Sir Robert G. W. Herbert, whose local experience of a high office in Queensland was of the utmost service at the Colonial Office, not only to himself in his duties as Permanent Under-Secretary, but to that cousin and chief Lord Carnarvon, whose sympathetic clearness of vision and administrative ability made the Colonial regime of the two relatives memorable abroad and profitable at home. Sir Robert Herbert was followed by a man person- ally resembling himself, the late Sir Robert Meade. Had he been as Avell known to the French critic 108 LORD WELBY already quoted as Lord Welby, he would assuredly have been named as another of Thackeray's creations converted into real life. The one point in which the authors of The Newcomes and of The Small Hoitse at Allington resembled each other was their life-like portrayal of well-bred, slightly cynical men of the world of the official class, such as one might count by the score during the season in the morning rooms of the Athenaeum, Union, or Arthur's clubs. Though no longer of it, to this class as its most highly trained representative now living, Lord Welby belongs. After close on forty years of service, he left the Treasury when Mn Gladstone finally retired from office in 1894. Almost from the day that his educa- tion was finished. Lord Welby during all these decades, surviving officially changes of Administration and shifting of chiefs, stood before society and the public, lounged in the club, was announced at Lord Mayors' dinners, as the highest incarnation of Treasury official- ism. In 1898, since the death of Henry Calcraft, he is, though retired, the doyen probably of the whole Civil Service, If now his old place is partly filled by another of Mr. Gladstone's training, Sir Edward Hamilton, he has the satisfaction of knowing not only that his own work is excellently carried on, but that much of this effectiveness is due to the living force of his example. 109 PERSONAL FORCES OF TEE FERIOD Lord Welby has been spoken of as a Somersetshire man. Whatever the name may be, it does not, to a Somersetshire ear, sound like a west-country one. As a fact, the county which Henry VIII. called " Brute and Beastly," but which gave a Worth to France and a Tennyson to England, also gave a Welby to the Treasury first, to the London County Council after- wards. Some qualities common to each of the Lincoln- shire natives now mentioned there are. If vulgarity be a sort of missing of the due proportion of things, the vice is one from which each of these sons of Lincolnshire is conspicuously free. The plane on which the contrary virtue is displayed by them is not morally or mentally the same. The perfection of artistic taste that makes a Tennyson the equal of a Sophocles or a Virgil, exercised on subjects less im- material gave Worth unchallenged precedence of all followers of the craft of Mr. Mantalini. Excellence, aesthetic, moral, or intellectual, of an analogous sort is a trait that impresses all who know Lord Welby in any relationship of life. In 1881 Mr. Herbert Gladstone became Junior Lord of the Treasury, his father of course then being First Lord. Even then Mr. Welby was regarded as the most trustworthy and highly finished depositary of Treasury traditions. The scene in the year now mentioned must be understood by the reader to be 110 LORD WELBY one of the first-floor reception-rooms at 10, Downing Street ; the occasion one of Mrs. Gladstone's receptions in the month of May. Standing very erect, inclining his body at a graceful angle a little forward, with the words, " Two bows for the Treasury, if you please," Mr. Welby varies with an object lesson in official deportment some good-natured remarks inspired by his long experience of official routine. The novice masters the lesson quickly and perfectly. The whole scene can never be forgotten by one who witnessed it. It might inspire an adequate artist with a worthy companion picture to the " Minuet Lesson," A painter will perhaps some day take the hint. Free from the daily trudge and drudge of Treasury work, Lord Welby, as in 1894 he became, was not entirely to put off official harness. The London County Council, from its experience of Lord Farrer and Lord Rosebery, had gained a taste for members educated in the service of the State. The ex-Treasury official was therefore elected an alderman of the L.C.C. ; in 1897 he became chairman of the Finance Committee ; in 1898, while retaining the departmental office, he was appointed vice-chairman. In other words, this very rus6 Treasury official is the chancellor of their exchequer to the London County Council. Thus the man who, short of the actual parliamentary responsibility, knows as much of the art of Budget 111 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD manufacture as any person now living, is likely for some little time to advise the London councillors in the preparation of their annual balance sheets. It is of happy omen for all interested in the govern- ment of the capital for a man of Lord Welby's antece- dents, temper, and training to have so clear a voice in Metropolitan administration. The Lord Mayor of 1898 has given proof of his desire to be on friendly terms with the London County Council. Such is indeed the settled policy of the Corporation. It is not always rendered easy by every member of the Council in the same degree. No figure at all civic hospitalities was more familiar than that of the present vice-chairman of the Council. Immediately after Mr. Harker had an- nounced General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the same sonorous tones filled the Jerusalem Chamber with the announcement of Sir Reginald Earle Welby. The trim little, active figure of the Commander-in-Chief of 1898 was often immediately followed by the taller, spare, but sinewy well-knit person of the man who to- day is a high official on the body in which his former hosts see their natural rival. As a man of the world, and above all of the London world, Lord Welby knows there is abundant room within the sound of Bow Bells for two correlative, to some extent co-e(}ual, bodies as well as a sufficiency of useful work for each to do. What made necessary the 112 LORD WELBY London County Government Act ? Chiefly the abuses and frequent inefficiency of the old Metropolitan Board of Works, which was never thoroughly representative, which gradually had become obsolete, if not corrupt. What the Board of Works might have done for the whole Metropolitan area, the London County Council is honestly and effectively performing. All the higher ornamental functions of the capital still need special personages for their despatch. These are the functions that Lord Welby well knows are suited to the Lord Mayor and Corporation as they could be to no other persons. Not only in the romantic and perhaps magnifying vision of foreigners, but in the practical judgment of prosaic Englishmen, the Lord Mayor of London will always represent the wealth, the enter- prise, the philanthropy of the Metropolis, and of the nation, on those occasions when these qualities need picturesquely to be embodied in an individual. To abolish the Lord Mayor and his office would be also to destroy, without anything to replace them, all the human machinery, all the business organization, for national, world-wide beneficence upon constantly re- curring emergencies. Without a Lord Mayor clothed in his present ceremonial functions, the City would be a repulsive and unintelligible chaos to many English- men, to all those foreigners to whom a Mansion House without a Lord Mayor would seem like Windsor Castle 113 I PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD without a Sovereign. Lord Welby, in other days, by his technical knowledge, has saved many governments and many chiefs from making fatal mistakes. By his innate and practised tact, by the instinct for concilia- tion and compromise bred of long knowledge of great affairs, no one could be more certain to combine loyalty to his office and his Body with the skill, urbanity, and discretion that will reduce to their smallest proportions all occasions of jealousy or needless friction between the two powers on whose mutual harmony there depends, not only the good government of London, but in no slight degree the interest of patriotism and philanthropy as well. 114 DIPLOMATISTS— NEW STYLE, AND SIR PHILIP CURRIE Thirty years ago Eton boys still sometimes settled their differences by the appeal to fists ; two junior Eton- ians, one of them being the Dr. Warre, the Head-master of 1898, were thus engaged in a spot of the grounds which, as they had forgotten, was at one point over- looked by the public. A tall Sixth Form " swell," with a pleasant face, particularly clear blue eyes, light wavy hair — in all respects a personable lad — lounged up to the battle ground ; with some disgust in his voice pointed to the quarter in which glimpses of the fi:ay could be caught by the profane public outside, uttered a few words as to the bad form of the proceeding, banged the two small pugilists' heads together ; sent them with a friendly kick off to their respective dames. The Eton monitor of the Sixth was to become some years later, in 1889, one of the successors to the great 115 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Eltchi of Kinglake at Constantinople. There, while these lines are written in 1898, he still remains. The qualities displayed by Philip Currie as an Eton boy have, to his own credit and the advantage of the public service, followed him through as varied a career as diplomacy often affords. Only in the latter half of our century has such a course become practicable for, and a recognized reward of, such antecedents. The novelist, Whyte Melville, once thought of drawing up the heads of a catechism for the social conduct of young Englishmen through life. It is a task for which, whether actually performed or not, its projector was admirably qualified. One of the cardinal precepts of the code — to shun as a work of Satan whatever is not demonstrably in good form — has been obeyed by Philip Currie, with a persistent loyalty which so consummate a connoisseur of life as Melville most highly would have admired. During many years much of what Francis Knollys, as shown elsewhere in these pages, has been to Marl- borough House, Philip Currie was to our Foreign Office in London. Allied on one side with the great commercial class, which has given England a Peel and a Gladstone, on the other with the Whig aristocracy that successively appointed a Fox and a Grey as its parliamentary manager, Philip Currie combines with the shrewd, sober, good sense of business Englishmen IIG SIR PHILIP CURPdE much of that force wherein an aristocracy, poor in ideas, is said by Tocqueville to be rich. Nor is the interest of PhiHp Currie's saunter through life personal only. His successive promotions have been the expression of the new forces that, long established in politics, last of all asserted themselves in the life of diplomacy. From that point of view, he is only one among several illustrations of a popular movement which only since the days of competitive examinations has touched the Foreign Office. There are no ancient precedents for the rise of Foreign Office clerks to the dignity of Plenipotentiary Ambassadors. Such eleva- tions belong exclusively to the democratic era of diplomacy. Every diplomatist whose record is of this character has been in his way a monument of the new forces at work in official life ; his own career has become in its turn a force to mould the career of others. While these lines are being written, one of Philip Currie's contemporaries whose antecedents have practically been his, is also an Ambassador, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff at Madrid. The late Sir R. Morier was himself at the Spanish capital before finally settling at St. Petersburg; in his childhood Morier had been patted on the head by duchesses ; he remembered the attention proudly in his manhood. His path of up- ward progress had, however, been through a severely official series of ascents. Commencing in the Privy 117 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Council office, he had been transferred after some years to the Foreign Office, where he was at the moment of his death perhaps the ablest of our then Ambassadors. To the same category belongs, too, Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British Ambassador appointed to Washington in 1893. He was a colleague of Currie at the Foreign Office ; before that he had interpreted law at the Colonial Office, having previously been Attorney-General at Hong Kong, a colony of whose legal procedure Sir Julian Pauncefote is the modern founder. The order of the professional advancement of Sir Philip Currie is not therefore altogether unusual in the present day. Together with Sir William White, who rose through the gradations of the Consular Service to a consummate mastery of the Eastern Question in all its departments, and who in the post, held in 1898 by Sir Philip Currie, made his mark as the official product of his age not less distinctly than Lord Stratford de RedclifFe half a century ago. Sir Philip Currie indicates the birth of a new era in our international arrangements for maintaining peace and smoothing over misunderstandings. Whenever, and by whomsoever, any proper account of the permanent Civil Service of Great Britain may be written, there are two names which will figure prominently in the nari'ative. One is that of Robert G. W. Herbert, now 118 SIE PHILIP CURRIE in retirement, but one who in the past has helped to build up our colonial system; the other is that of Philip Currie. The latter not for his technically official services alone. As resident chief clerk at the Foreign Office before being Under Secretary, Sir Philip Currie in these days of newspaper diplomacy filled a position excep- tionally difficult and delicate in his relations to the Cabinet of the day on the one hand, and to the public press on the other. No man could show a juster sense of the need of not offending the collectors of news who are also the manufacturers of public opinion. No official was ever so absolutely impervious to the arts for extracting State secrets prematurely that the members of the Fourth Estate practise with such skill. One of Sir Philip Currie's predecessors at the Foreign Office was the experienced, able, and kindly Lord Hammond, who as an educator of Foreign Office youth had few equals and no superiors ; but most of Lord Hammond's work was done before the cheap press had made a position for itself warranting the claim of its representatives to be a power co-equal with Downing Street or Whitehall. The bland and smiling urbanity with which Under Secretary Currie received editorial emissaries from Fleet Street, imparted to them exactly what his skilled judgment saw harmlessly might be divulged by the broadsheets read of millions, kept back 119 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the one thing of which the journalist possibly wished to possess himself, but, whether giving or withholding, produced on his literary visitor an impression of being taken into exceptional confidence, was not an art that Hammond had been trained to practise. This loyalty to inviolate Foreign Office traditions, and politic recog- nition of the uses of newspapers, were combined with the exemplary allegiance of the permanent civilian to the political chief of the day, now a Granville or a Rosebery, now a Salisbury. Himself a convinced Whig of the popular kind, Philip Currie was among the first of Whitehall officials not only to recognize the command- ing qualifications of the Tory Secretary of State, but to hint to men in a position to influence opinion by their writings the estimate likely to be formed of Lord Salisbury as a diplomatist by an impartial posterity. The diplomatic school to which Sir Philip Currie belongs is, with the needful modernizations, that of another member of the craft whose political opinions are probably in most points his own. Lord Dufferin, though, under an unreasonable age limit, having re- nounced Embassies, no more in active service, is yet assuredly an active force in his profession. One of his pupils trained on his Syrian staff half a century ago, the late Robert H. Meade, passed away not long before these lines were written. Lord Dufferin's cheery cynicism, constituting his great charm, is indeed an 120 SIR PHILIP CURRIE incommunicable gift. The combination of the oriental kismet with the national humour of the Celt causes Lord Dufferin's State paper summing up the results of his special mission to Egypt (1882-83) to be a master- piece of literary happiness and diplomatic irony which his disciples, conscious of their inability to reproduce, have wisely forborne to imitate. Lord DufFerin having been sent to Egypt to create for it a political constitu- tion, long before he had seriously taken the task in hand, knew instinctively as well as from experience that the self-government of the land of the Pharaohs was an absurdity. But it was his duty to do something. No scheme more ingenious or complete in all its parts could have been devised by an Egyptian Solon, Its one weakness was that responsibility for putting the project into action could not be localized. It was as if the secret of perpetual motion should be solved with- out any revelation of a ^;7^mM?;i mohile to set it going. Lord Dufferin's private copy of this report, with marginal annotations by its author, may perhaps some day be unearthed from the literary rubble on the banks of old Nile ; in comparison with such a find every papyrus, Aristotelian or Christian, discovered during our day in this mysterious land, will lose all its value. Such of the DufFerin traditions as a diplomatist who wisely leaves literature to his accomplished wife could 121 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD perpetuate, have been advantageously reproduced by Sir Philip Currie on the Bosphorus. His social naviga- tion of the Golden Horn on such a little craft as Lord Dufferin designed has provided the English colony with many pleasant picnic trips ; nor were British social interests in all their aspects ever organized better in the land of the Turk than by Lord Dufferin's latest successor. Difficult as under any circumstances the highest sort of success of a British Ambassador to the Porte must be, the difficulty in the case of Sir Philip Currie has been increased by the exceptional tenor of instructions from home. These injunctions necessarily reflect English public opinion. A Sultan more confidingly docile than Abdul Hamid might in- telligibly enough be confused when he tried to harmonize the complimentary allusions in the English press to his condition, present or future, and the phraseological urbanity employed in his despatches by the English Foreign Minister and in many of his con- versations by the English Ambassador. During the whole time that the Sultan has been portrayed as an enemy of the human race by British journalists, he was being approached as the Queen's ally by the representative of the British Government. If he has not cultivated Lord Dufferin's subtle and delightful gift of literary irony, Sir Philip Currie is endowed with a keen sense of British humour. That he 122 SIR PHILIP GURRIE has not dwelt with some bitterness in his despatches on certain impracticable features in his task is proof of his good temper. That, under the circumstances, instead of having failed signally he has, in the opinion of all experts, as well as of the public, achieved a substantial success, more than justifies his original appointment. Like all Eastern towns which affect to be civilized, and possess a society with sets of their own, Constantinople is among the most socially cosmo- politan places in the world. That environment suits Sir Philip Currie and his Ambassadress exactly. English above all things in his strong, clear, good sense, like his accomplished wife he is a domesticated citizen of the world. It was not, one may suppose, the evangelical associations of the neighbourhood, but rather its convenient proximity to the Foreign Office, that caused Philip Currie to select Clapham Common as a place for a suburban country-house. Brewster Lodge, as to its architecture, its cool galleries peopled with statuary, within, its classic cypress trees bordering the encaustic tiled walks, without, might have been a villa from Northern Italy. Its flower-beds had enough of colour and careful tending to please Lord Beaconsfield himself. As was the building itself, and its local setting, such was its society and hospitality when its owner, driving ■ down from Whitehall, enter- tained much of what was brightest in the society of 123 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD London, and nearly all that was worth entertaining or meeting in the strangers from all quarters of the world who might for the moment happen to be within our gates. Brewster Lodge was not a palazzo or a chateau ; its owner called it a cottage. Much of its contents, its crockery, its vertu, might have been envied by an art museum. The dominant quality of its decorations was its good taste and congruity with the nationality and character of the master. The engravings of statesmen and diplomatists, chiefly of the Whig connection, in their simply suitable black frames, reminded the foreigner of his being not in the apartment of a Parisian boulevardier, but beneath the roof of a thorough Englishman, who, being at home wherever diplomacy is known, could never forget or compromise his nationality. This is what foreigners like and expect in the representative of England abroad. This is what they found in, this why they admired, the Lord Lyons, so long our Ambassador in Paris. Tlian that diplomatist, no one adapted himself more thoroughly to Parisian habits or environments, not even excepting the Parisian restrictions on the amount of physical exercise which the Briton usually takes. Yet Lord Lyons was as essentially British as his pedigree, as Winchester and Christ Church, or Pall Mall and Whitehall could make him. From him, as fri(md and teacher, Philip Currie has learnt much that 124 SIB PHILIP CURRIE is equally useful to him in dealing with the Porte, the Sultan, or the European colony at Constantinople. The same devotion to the leading principles of good form and good taste that made him when an Eton monitor reprimand the lower boys who might be bringing scandal on their school, has marked his efforts in these later days, supplemented as they are with the grace and tact of Lady Currie, to organize the elements of Western society in the Eastern capital on lines equally conducive to the satisfaction of those forming that society, and to the credit of the country that the organizer represents. While these lines are being written, Sir Philip Currie is announced as about to exchange Constantinople for Rome. Those cultivated tastes of letters and art which have been explained here will make him happily at home in the Eternal City; the change, it may be hoped, will stimulate his rarely gifted wife to fresh literary work. At Rome our Ambassador will find, as the representative of the France he knows so well, Camille Ban-ere, not long since transferred thither from Berne. The career of this very clever Frenchman is of interest to Englishmen because, more crucially than in any British instance yet on record, it illustrates those forces of the moment that are breaking down the old barriers of exclusiveness in the most exclusive 125 PEBSOXAL FORGES OF THE PERIOD of all professions; and are making even diplomacy a career open to all the talents. Leaving his country after the internal disturbances which followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, M. Barrere came to England, lived here some time, made his mark in first- class journals as a writer for the London press. One of the band of brilliant young men about Gambetta, he returned to Paris when that statesman's power was consolidated, and was an active member of the staff of Gambetta's organ, the RepuUique Frangaise. Thence, after the death of his old chief, when the consti- tutional republic had now become an accepted fact, Camille Barrere, by his inherent fitness for the work, with no advantages of rank or wealth, gravitated into diplomacy; he represented France in two successive Conferences, at London during the Foreign Secretary- ship of Lord Granville, that on the Danube, and that on Egypt. After this he became French Resident at Cairo : very shortly afterwards, he blossomed out into a full Ambassador in the sequences already named. Sir Philip Currie's removal from the Turkish to the Roman capital has made way for the transfer of Sir Frank Lascelles from Berlin to the Porte. But other changes in the Service will not long be delayed. Inde- pendently of family connections, or patronage in high places, the best ability which the profession contains will assert itself. It will be supported by public opinion 126 SIR PHILTP CURRIE in its progress towards promotion. Like Sir Philip Currie at an earlier date, H. Austin Lee was formerly Clerk in Residence at the Foreign Office ; to-day he is attached to the Embassy in Paris. He has been employed on several important businesses elsewhere. He has the useful knack of securing what is wanted from those with whom he is sent to negotiate. In his future he will ere long emulate the success of an English Currie or a French Barrere. He will thus exemplify as these have done those forces of the period which place Sir Philip Currie at the Quirinal, Sir Julian Pauncefote at Washington, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff at Madrid. 127 LOED WOLSELEY AND "THOSE ABOUT HIM" The best known of British generals being two in number, it was to be expected that they should popu- larly be indicated by the well-worn phrase of Virgil : Duo f'ldmina belli. The words could not perhaps be more pre-eminently misapplied. Whatever likeness to the great Scipio (not to mention his descendants), or to any other general of antiquity, may be borne by captains of other ages in other lands as thunderbolts of war, in the two English commanders the imagin- ation of the poet himself could have found nothing to fit his metaphor to a Roberts or a Wolseley, who are both popularizcrs rather than projectiles of Mars. The simile therefore should be reserved for those to whom it is so obviously suitable as two brethren of the house of Beresford. Off the field of battle, in the parts which their country- men at home know best, what our field-marshals have 128 LORD WOLSELEY done is appreciably to ingratiate the army with the democracy on the one hand and society on the other. Both commanders are of nearly the same age. Both within about the same space of time have won a reputation among continental critics of British prowess in the art of war. Neither has thus far failed success- fully to execute any special enterprise entrusted to him by the Government of the day. Of each therefore, judging by the test of achievement, the personal partisans are entitled to assert a capacity of planning, carrying out, and winning an European campaign on the same scale as Wellington, always supposing him to handle an army equal to the task. Another feature in common presented by the two careers is that, alone perhaps among our great captains now alive, they have combined conspicuous gifts with signal opportunities. To mention one who is gone, and two in 1898 still living, Sir George Hamley, more than any other of his contemporaries the educator of the modern officer, never enjoyed the chance of doing full justice to his genius as a commander. None of their critics has imputed want of ability to an Adye or a Lintom Simmons ; both have lacked opportunity. In this respect the two last named may be compared with Lynedoch and Hill among their predecessors, both admirable lieutenants ; neither ever in a position to prove himself a great strategist. If the success 129 K PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of General Adye require some qualifications, the obvious explanation is his political heterodoxy. For when it is said that a soldier should have no politics, what, as it should seem, is meant, is that those politics must be of the true blue colour. General Adye had the misfortune to be the confidant of the Conservative Ministers who resigned their places under Mr. Disraeli during the jingo epidemic of 1878. While his Canadian and Ashanti laurels were still fresh — again, if perhaps in a less degree, after his Egyptian campaigns of the eighties. Lord Wolseley occupied a place never perhaps filled before by any British general in the popular mind. Those were the halcyon days of Gladstonian liberalism. Yet even then society, as it has been reorganized in our time, did not heartily accept the great leader of his party. The army was still fretting under the results of the Cardwell reforms of 1871. Short service was declared to have consigned the service to the dogs ; the unpopu- larity of that change, rendered absolutely inevitable by events, was due not more to its operation than to its political authorship. The country did not much heed the military malcontents. Englishmen happened then to believe in the imperial statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone, and the administrative competence of his colleagues. At that juncture, the most successful, the 130 LORD WOLSELEY best known general of the hour became identified with the latest military reforms by the party not loved of the soldier. Lord Wolseley did not avow himself a Gladstonian. He left civil partisanship for men of peace. But he dared to say that even the Liberals had not unmade the army as an instrument of war. Great victories in the field have before now been won by generals without commending the winners in the same degree to their compatriots as this attitude oi the then Sir Garnet Wolseley won for him the favour of the mass of his fellow-electors throughout the country. The suspicion, largely groundless, of unpopu- larity in high places, helped rather than hindered Lord Randolph Churchill with the masses during the earlier part of his meteoric course. The idea that a Wolseley risked his professional future for the sake of his political convictions helped him in the same way with the multitude. His public services were well set off by his personal advantages of appearance and manner. The neat, compact figure, with the professional moustache, the alert, soldier-like deportment, the air of general good temper with himself and his fellow-creatures — these qualities made their possessor a favourite at every point, whether in the environment of court or camp, that he showed himself At this time, too, he was practically without a rival in his craft ; the star of a Roberts had not then risen ; the figure of a Wolseley 131 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD was in the popular eye literally that of " our only general." To a man exciting these feelings among his fellow- citizens, the appointment to succeed the Duke of Cambridge was in effect not so much promotion as probation by a most severe ordeal. The responsibility of office could not fail to bring with it some diminution of personal regard. So unreasonably high was expect- ation raised as inevitably to provoke the nemesis of disappointment. That the condition on which the highest military office was accepted, has been self- effacement ; that in the general who now reigns at the Horse Guards there is left nothing of the popular hero who, in London streets or parks as well as in London drawing-rooms, used to receive the same sort of atten- tion as the popular Premier or player — this is the natural present for such a past ; the sequel made from the first unavoidable by such anticipations. It is, however, merely an incident in a career; when that career comes to be looked at in its completion the casual episode will be seen in its true perspective, therefore in its trivial proportions. Whatever Lord Wolseley may at any time have said on the subject, there can be no question as to what he has done. The Cardwell reforms have not even yet perhaps had the full as well as fair chance their advocates demand for them. Of these changes Lord 132 LORD WOLSELEY Wolseley has always been a staunch supporter. If from his speeches or writings may be quoted extracts complimentary in the same degree and in nearly identical terms to the soldier who is the product of long, and to the soldier who is the product of short, service, two things must be remembered. In the first place, even a Commander-in-Chief not being above the level of an ordinary subject is as an officer influenced by his environment ; always to approve the army changes tainted by Liberal associations when one lives among soldiers is scarcely less difficult than for the genteel inhabitant of the Midland " Dukeries " to show himself a consistent democrat. Secondly, Lord Wolseley, though originally his family was settled in the Midlands, is himself an Irishman ; he has the impulsiveness of his race, the quality shows itself on the platform or in the study: it disappears on the field. The Irish strain in the blood of a Wolseley is not entirely wanting in a Roberts. From the words spoken or written of that general it would be easier to select censures on short service than any words qualifying such criticisms. The professional calibre of the two officers, as shown by their public records, leaves perhaps little space for contrast. Both have thus far so con- sistently risen to the immediate emergency confronting them as to justify the faith of their friends that in whatever way he may yet be tried, neither is likely to 133 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD be found wanting. Enthusiastic devotion from the comparatively few brought during active service into close contact with him has long been enjoyed by Lord Wolseley. General acceptability to the officers whom he rules is not possessed by him in an eminent degree. That for causes creditable to the commander. The old designation by their numbers of regiments is still dear to soldiers of all degrees. Such nomenclature officially has been superseded by the territorial titles. Lord Wolseley therefore has no option but to recognize the style which is more recent, and observed in the Army List ; to ignore that which is the more venerable and the richer in historical associations. Fou comme un vieu militaire is a familiar adage, but the qualifying epithet of age would not if omitted altogether lessen its truth. The army reforms that were new more than a quarter of a century since are not yet sufficiently old to be venerated by the military mind. From the championship of these changes the successor of the Duke of Cambridge has never flinched. Beloved therefore by " those about him," whether soldiers or civilians, with a power of attracting followers, in itself a proof of moral and mental greatness, Lord Wolseley, all honour to him, remains to-day to some extent the soldier of the non-combatant democracy ; the character in which he first became a great public personage. 134 LORD WOLSELEY On the other hand the soldiers' soldier is pre- eminently Lord Roberts — a born fighter like Browning's hero, and a predestined leader of men. The strength, dash, power of will and intellect that was part of the equipment of the Duke of Wellington have never in one individual been combined with so much of the paternal solicitude of a Havelock, a Colin Campbell, a McLeod for the daily welfare of his men as in Lord Roberts. This explains why, when there is hard business to be done, Lord Roberts is without an equal among his predecessors or contemporaries in getting the best work from first to last out of the men whom he not only leads but inspires. It is scarcely pre- sumptuous on the part of a civilian to speak not too respectfully of the differentiating epithet of scientific as withheld from one of these generals and conceded to the other. Lords Roberts and Wolseley are both scientific soldiers because great captains in the two services necessarily have ever been so. Like the four- teenth Lord Derby himself, who was always so proud of it, Wellington and Nelson both belonged to a pre- scientific age in their professions. That is to say, they acted science instead of talking about it. The scientific commander by sea or land is, it may be submitted, he who so makes his dispositions as to ensure with as much certainty as is given to the sons of men an issue either positively successful or at least not disastrous. 135 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD In these respects there is not only no contrast, there is positive identity between our two generals. Both are, apart from professional attainments, notably well- educated men. Both are the sons of officers nurtured from infancy in their profession. Both may be claimed by Ireland as in part her sons. As a lad, to his exceeding honour, the future victor of Tel-el-Kebir was indebted chiefly to his own judgment, resolution, and industry, disconcerted by circumstances for his thorough grounding in all departments of humane learning; he even accomplished the rare achievement of making himself not only an appreciative, but an accurate scholar in most of the Latin, in some of the Greek classics; so that to-day if the habit had not gone out. Lord Wolseley, when speaking in the Peers, could quote with not less effect, with more correctness than the Duke of Wellington sometimes did. The knowledge of Lord Roberts was acquired under easier circumstances, and through the more conventional agency of public schools, civilian or military. Each man has won his spurs in professional authorship ; for each excels in that pure, nervous English which, shunning rhetoric as the British subaltern would shrink from the elegancies of a French dancing-master, says in the fewest possible words what the writer wishes said beyond risk of mistake. " In the days of the Duke " the whole army, officers and men, might be 136 LORD WOLSELEY spoken of as the school of Wellington. In the case of soldiers who have served in India a like distinction might be ascribed to Lord Roberts, who, on such occasions as he speaks in the House of Lords, addresses his peers not as a soldier lecturing civilians at the United Service Institute, but as an Etonian speaking to old Etonians after himself having gathered the experience of a military Ulysses. Lord Wolseley's influence has been of a more immediately diffusive kind. On the youngest son of Queen Victoria, as in the fulness of time Lord Wolseley's successor, the hopes of an army and a nation seem to be fixed. For of the professional popularity of a Commander-in-Chief being a royal duke there can be no doubt whatever. As much perhaps might be said of the professional advantages of such an arrange- ment. But if when the time comes the Wolseley precedent is to be followed, the attainments of his pupils already ensure abundant material from which to select. Sir Evelyn Wood is too nearly the con- temporary of his chief to be placed in the list of his pupils. Colley, whose participation in the Wellesley blood gave him not a few of the qualities as a leader of men, died at Majuba Hill. There remains of "Wolseley's men" the extraordinarily able William Butler. He combines with the deepest and maturest knowledge of his profession commanding power of 137 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD intellect, intrepid generalship, and a popularity with all sorts and conditions of soldiers exceeding that of his master. Here then is at once the hope for the future of our army and the best vindication of a Roberts and a Wolseley indifferently to a front place among the personal forces of our period. " They are the two best dressed women in Europe." Such was the judgment passed by a Parisian expert of the period some years ago on two ladies who, on the day of the Grand Prix, were sitting in the French President's box at Longchamps. One of the pair was Madame Carnot ; the other was Lady Wolseley. How far the estimate is true must be left to the Parisian successor of Mr. Worth, or his London equivalent, Madame Reilly, to determine. The words may remind those outside the world of milliners that the name of Wolseley is scarcely less familiar to the social connoisseurs of the Continent than to those of London. No one better understood than the shrewd and amusing Welshman, Captain of Foot Guards, best of our earlier " Reminiscents," Rees Howell Gronow, what were the qualities that the French instinctively looked for and admired in the military representatives of other nations, hostile or allied. The only occasion whereon Gronow ever met the future successor of the Duke of Cambridge was when Wolseley, visiting Paris, chatted with him in the courtyard of Meurice's Hotel, 138 LORD WOLSELEY during the earlier sixties, not very long before the death of the veteran fianeur. "That," was Gronow's comment after the interview, " is the sort of man we ought to have for our military attacM here, and that I should like to see at the head of our Horse Guards." Coming from one who had begun to learn his soldiering under the Duke of Wellington, directly after his last birching by Dr. Keate, these words have a practical value apart from their prophetic interest. Little did Gronow foresee that within some thirty years of their utterance Wolseley's favourite pupil, Henry Bracken- bury, attached to our Embassy in the Rue St. Honore, would be a favourite with all the critics, civil or military, on the Seine ; that on the Thames Wolseley himself would have reached a point in his profession, making his promotion to the highest position of all only a matter of time. Monsieur Malo, the very accomplished military critic and military editor of Les Ddhats, and countless other experts scarcely less competent, may be heard in Paris day by day intelli- gently discussing the relative merits of a Wolseley and a Roberts as high captains, with the same warmth and interest that a like question is argued in the ante- rooms of British messes, or between retired or active officers in the clubs of Cheltenham, Leamington, or Bath. It was a familiar remark of Sir Charles Napier, that the time was coming when European armies 139 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD would never know from one day to another with which or against which of their number they might be called upon to act. Imagine the friction, the confusion and the consequent waste of energy that would be averted by the presence of a Wolseley on the spot, should the two armies ever operate again together as in Crimean days. No sketch of Lord Wolseley would be even partially complete if it left out of account the force with which his personal qualities appeal to the popular mind of our nearest neighbour on the Continent, or the attraction which his whole career has for the French public generally; a sentiment as powerful in its way as the admiring interest with which Lady Wolseley 's toilettes inspired the French observer on the Parisian racecourse. 140 LORD CHARLES BERESFORD " Not the sweet little cherub which keeps watch o'er poor Jack, but the tar himself who keeps the Navy from going to the dogs." On the la.wn of a Bucking- hamshire country house, that of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, Waddesdon, near Aylesbury, these words were, during the eighties of this century, uttered by Lord Randolph Churchill, the occasion being one of the parties at which the host pleasantly entertained persons of promise or performance in Parliament or in the public services. The human object of the remark was reclining the while in a cord hammock slung under one of the trees thriving in, not native to, the Buckinghamshire soil ; those trees, as a matter of fact, had been transplanted bodily a few years ago from a leafy park in Kent to what was then a sandy, shrubless plateau in Bucks, on which Baron Ferdinand's men were just setting to work. " A good deal more than that," rejoined Sir 141 PERSON-AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD William Gregory, of Galway, Ceylon, parliamentary and pictorial fame, being also one of the company. " For," he continued, "as you are democratizing Torjdsm, so Charles Beresford has already made the Navy a demo- cratic interest. Something in this way was it that Socrates of old brought down philosophy from the gods to men." There were fewer better amateur scholars, modern or classical, of the old sort than this Sir William Gregory, whose death in 1892 eclipsed the harmless gaiety of one of the best sets of social London. As for Lord Charles Beresford, the then dozing object of the little dialogue on the Waddesdon lawn, his presence could not have been better suggested than by Churchill ; nor his mission more tersely and truth- fully summarized than by Gregory. The careers of the two men, Randolph Churchill and Charles Beresford, began as nearly as possible at the same time. The completion in the succeeding stages of each was signalized with the same sort of bright and breezy celebration ; every phase in the public development of the two characters stirred a like kind of interest in the popular breast. The antiquarian may for a pre- cedent to all this refer to Disraeli and the Young Englandism of 1846. For more modern students it is enough to point out that if there had been no " party of two " as set forth in a preceding chapter, there would have been no 142 LORD CHARLES BERESFORD Fourth Party; neither any Randolph Churchill nor any Charles Beresford in the light in which both these figures will appear in the national gallery of political notabilities. Why should the Radicals have all the fun and popularity to themselves any more than, as Luther asked, a certain personage should be allowed to monopolize the best tunes ? To put the matter his- torically, Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke by their dramatic attitudes of picturesque and stimulating Liberalism, had revived and more circumstantially elaborated than their earlier exemplar ever thought of doing, the popular politics of Charles James Fox. What that pleasure-loving, Greek and Latin reading, card-playing, self-indulgent, intellectual man about town in the period of the Regency was to his W^est- minster constituents, and at certain points where he happened personally to be known, e. g. the neighbour- hoods of St. Anne's Hill and Newmarket, that Sir Charles Dilke was to the householders of Chelsea. That was Mr. Chamberlain to the small manufacturers in the capital of hardware. Sir Charles Dilke's establishment in his course had been preceded by his fame as a clever Cantab equally good in the Senate House, where he had taken honours in law, and on the river, where during most of his time he had coached his college eight. The parliamentary dehut of Mr. Chamberlain had been heralded by the fame of his 143 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD municipal achievements rather than by the trumpet of academic renown. The personal attribute in which a Churchill resembled a Chamberlain was a taste for tobacco, a dislike of physical exercise. And as Mr. Chamberlain's imputed republicanism was his earliest bid for notoriety, so the story of a difference between Lord Randolph Churchill and the Prince of Wales helped the Blenheim-born politician to compete with the Midland municipalist in democratic favour. From his political, if not his natural, infancy. Lord Charles Beresford on the other hand rejoiced in the unbroken friendship of the Heir Apparent. Shortly before he first spoke in the House of Commons, his appearance had become known in every middle-class household by a picture in a weekly paper representing him as pulling the Princess of Wales in a row-boat on a roughish sea to her husband's yacht in the offing. In addition to all this, he enjoyed of course the popular advantages of his family name and traditions. The British demo- cracy always likes a young lord the better if the record of some of his ancestors' high courage be spiced with just a dash of rowdyism. No family name within the four seas fell on the popular ear as such a synonym for British pluck as that of Beresford. This particular member of the race seemed popularly not less fomons and familiar on shore than on sea. There was nothing of the sailor's proverbial inexperience of horse-flesh in 144 LORD CHARLES BERESFORD the way in Avhich the naval officer handled his team at the Magazine with probably one Royal or Court lady beside him on the box-seat. If there were a sudden alarm of fire within the bills of mortality, Lord Charles Beresford would race with the fire brigade to the spot; if there were a new steam-engine to be run, the same young patrician would contrive to mount by the side of the driver, perhaps himself to pilot the iron horse. The record of all these things was not only wTitten, but pictorially circulated throughout the realm. Only in an age of advertisement could such a quality in degree of popularity be acquired. A Beresford, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Dilke, without a cheap press would have had no more chance than a Pitt without a Parliament. While he was still in the prime of that youth which in appearance he has not yet outlived, Lord Charles Beresford had become known as widely as, and much more respectably than, a certain notorious ancestor of his. He had in fact stepped into something of the same sort of place as that filled in earlier Victorian days by a well-remembered Duke of Sutherland. In his own time, he had taken occasional lessons in the Churchill school without being its passive disciple. Whether the middle or the working classes are the kings of England, he knew the temper of the monarchy exercised would be the same, and that the qualities regarded under an old dispensation would not 145 L PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD be at a discount under the new. Mere genius might enjoy a transient renown. For those whose cleverness fell short of the consecrating mark he knew ability and smartness must be backed by knowledge ; he deter- mined in his own instance to show how this could be done. Of course the superficial observer of the member for Waterford (74 to '80), for Marylebone ('85 to '89), was likened to a naval officer upon the quarter-deck, and was found to reproduce in his manner all the little traditional tricks of sailors. Be that as it may, Lord Charles Beresford as parlia- mentarian never failed to show himself a good deal more than a holiday tar. During the intervals of his political career, on each successive term of service with his ship, he showed he had lost nothing by his holiday on land. On shipboard he was more than the smart and capable officer ; he was the seaman grinding at the technique of his craft with the industry of a budding Board of Trade pilot or a full-developed Mr, Thomas Gibson Bowles. Dr. Johnson's definition of a ship was : " A prison with a chance of getting drowned in it," The scientific definition of an ironclad should be: A floating factory with a certainty of being blown up if any of the machinery goes wrong. Lord Charles Beresford therefore caused himself to know not only everything appertaining to navigation, but all the 146 LORD CHARLES BERESFORD details of the working and regulation of steam power. He took in the essential points of a naval or military situation as quickly and surely as a hunting man learns to choose his right line across country. Whether they be with their ship or in the Senate, ashore or afloat, in time of peace as in time of war, there is always national work for men of this sort to do. One great administrative danger may come from the extreme jealousy with which the Treasury, as it is bound to do, eyes the policy of the great spending departments of the State. There is always a chance lest professional zeal should inspire naval and military advisers with counsel professionally justifiable rather than patriotically wise. Men of the type of Lord Charles Beresford are not likely to disregard the promptings of their profession. Their close touch with the democracy, especially if they represent in- dustrial constituencies, is a guarantee that their advice will not ignore the civilian conditions and the political necessities of a given situation. Not of course that the Navy politician now spoken of is more infallible on the platform than with his pen. Like Lord Wolseley, when out of his element he is liable to be carried beyond his serious thoughts and his words as he is certain to be calm and prudent in action. The genuine and deliberate opinion on any point of naval administration or policy of Lord Charles 147 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Beresford would be valued alike by nautical experts and responsible statesmen. The one requisite is to be sure one knows what he means, that what this meaning may be his words correctly declare. Popular in such a service, such a man as a matter of course is. It is not this popularity which makes him, and those like him, so useful a force. The quality by which this country became great is the same as that by which individual Britons under any conditions succeed, because they are thorough. So long as in this way militarism be industrially qualified, jingoism is as nationally harmless as the measles. Men, and there are many in every vocation, like Lord Charles Beresford, incarnate a standard of professional fitness and political reasonableness that acts like a national tonic. They are professional models. As in the matter of Wei-hai-Wei, during the Anglo-Russo-Chinese crises of 1898, they keep the Government of the day in close touch with the patriotism of the democracy. It has been to the advantage of Lord Charles Beresford that his domestic surroundings are not exclusively of a professional sort; that his wife has known other associations than those of warfixre. Lady Charles Beresford is one of the adroitest hostesses in society, identifying herself with her husband's professional and political ideas ; she has the 148 LORD CHARLES BERESFORD good fortune of coming from a stock neither naval, military, nor titularly ennobled. The daughter of a typical Conservative member of the new school, Colonel Richardson Gardner, she has inherited her father's practical good sense in all worldly matters, adding to these family attributes a grace, vivacity, good humour, and tact partly the result of a careful nurture, but chiefly the gifts of a bountiful nature. The Beresford combination of social smartness and professional zeal is in its way a public, not less than a class good. 149 LORD CHIEF JUSTICE RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN " The most complete and representative man at the Bar, or of his age." So spoke the late Judah P. Benjamin, the Attorney-General of Jefferson Davis at the beginning of his career ; by sheer force of intellect a leader in the English Courts at its close, and enter- tained at dinner by the whole Bar of England in 1882. The remark applied as that gentleman was leaving the room to the Attorney-General of 1886, the Lord Chief Justice of 1898. The truth of the description was recognized instinctively by the shrewd men about town, and the lawyers who heard it, in the Portland Club, Stafford Place, where Mr. Benjamin, one of the first whist-players in the world, happened, together with Lord Russell of Killowen, to be during the early days of the 1880 Gladstone Government when Charles Russell's forensic fame was at its height. The keynote of the character of the man could not 150 LOUD RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN in so few words more truthfully have been sounded. The sentence could nowhere have been more fitly spoken than on those premises where their meetings are held by the whist-players of two hemispheres, many of them lawyers, more of them politicians. What was exactly in the mind of Mr. Benjamin when he so delivered himself is not difficult to see. The principles of law may be immutable as those of equity are eternal. Nothing changes more quickly or often with the changing times than the personnel of every branch of the legal profession. Bleak House at the time it appeared was a perfectly truthful picture of the then condition of legal methods as well as legal persons of all degrees. " Mr. Tulkinghorn " might in 1852 have been met not only in his chambers, or by special appointment within the precincts of West- minster, but in any of those country houses of which "Sir Leicester Dedlock's" was a type. To-day this highly respectable old family solicitor could not be encountered even by accident in or near the Royal Courts of Justice. His chambers in Lincoln's Inn have long been occupied by no member of his family ; by no one in the slightest degree resembling him, but by a magnificently dressed young man, who always wears a camellia in his button-hole, of ruddy com- plexion, jet-black hair, and aquiline nose. He rides to his chambers every morning after a canter round 151 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Hyde Park ; of an afternoon he is called for when business is over by a lady not unlike himself in counte- nance, whose toilettes are the admiration of her family, the despair of her rivals, and whose evenings at their house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, gain distinction from the presence of Cabinet Ministers, Foreign Secre- taries, Ambassadors, and the " Lord Chief" himself. For this solicitor of the new school, a man of fashion, a sportsman, whose name is Braham Deuceace, and who has long since superseded " Tulkinghorn," is the in- carnation of all the smartness of his branch of the profession, as well as of that social omniscience which is a sort of power making him the most deadly danger- ous of foes. In the days of his advocacy, the briefs given by Mr. Braham Deuceace to the future judge were worthy even of a leader's attention. Now that the erewhile leader is in the highest place, the suc- cessor of Cockburn and Coleridge would have a con- tempt for himself if he slighted the friends of other days. There is no taste, social or intellectual, dignified by judicial or high professional precedent which is ignored by Lord Russell of Killowen. The Rugeley poisoning case of which in 1856 every one was talking, is remem- bered, if at all, to-day chiefly for the speech for the prosecution of a then future Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Other qualities than the in- 152 LORD RUSSELL OF KILLOWEF tellectual skill in the marshalling of damning evidence made this address so memorably effective. Cockburn was as seasoned a man of the world as Ballantine himself; with an expert's knowledge of the seamier sides of turf life and character. After the prisoner had heard that great effort, he felt the hangman's noose tighten round his neck. Palmer said as he stepped down from his place — " It is the ' riding ' that's done it." Whatever acquaintance Cockburn may have had with the inner life of the turf, is possessed probably in a more practical shape by the latest occupant of his judicial place. No figure is more familiar on Newmarket Heath than that of the well-knit, quietly but sportingly dressed gentleman, whose holiday from his court is taken on the back of the workman-like cob upon the East Anglian enclo- sure, which is said many years ago to have been the scene of the first, a purely chance, meeting of the then Lord Hartington, fresh from Trinity on the Cam, and his future fellow follower of Mr. Gladstone, Charles Russell, then fresh from another Trinity on the Liffey. The Bar steeplechases have not in 1898 been dis- continued ; they are still the same as when Cockburn, then freshly called, went near to landing his horse a winner ; if Cockburn's latest successor has not taken so active a part in them, he has seldom failed to be a spectator; his services might well be desired as judge. 153 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Thus in its social aspects does Lord Russell justify Benjamin's phrase as a representative of his profession. If it was at Newmarket that he first met one political ally of his future, at his country house, Tadworth, Surrey, his next-door neighbour is also another parlia- mentary collaborator, Lord Rosebery at the Durdans. In all artistic matters Cockburn's taste was correctly educated. The art which he loved best and of which he knew most was music. There are many still living who can recall the evenings in Hertford Street, when Cockburn had gathered round him the choicest vocal- ists and performers of the day as his guests. During many years, before he had reached his present position, Lord Russell's dinner-parties in Harley Street had a legal as well as social distinction of their own. By the side of the official represent- atives of the Bar, were members of the same pro- fession, notably of the families of Clay and Walker, who, having been the champions of their university in sport, were not disgracing it in their professional toil. It is longer ago than some may care to realize that R. D. Walker of Brasenose played for Oxford, and won some of the earliest inter-university billiard matches ever held. Since then he had given himself to law with the same zeal that he had shown for sport before. Lord Russell is or was fairly dexterous with the cue. He had perhaps forgotten the Oxford performances of 154 LORD RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN his guest ; at any rate the host was rather surprised when, after dinner in the billiard-room at the back of his Harley Street house, this most redoubtable of the Walkers, although handicapped by a liberal giving of points, easily and victoriously ran out before his host. The friendly critics of Cockbum in his profession were surprised at nothing more than the easy mastery which, when representing England in the Alabama case at Geneva, he seemed to both sides to speak as one who had himself witnessed every incident in the career of the contraband cruiser, from her first sailing from Birkenhead, her two years' havoc among the northern merchant ships, to her destruction by the Kearsage off Cherbourg in 1864. Before any international tribunal, be the subject the running of blockades or the fishing for seals, Sir Charles Russell would not be inferior in his thorough acquisition of esoteric details to his great forerunner. But among the parliamentary services of this able Irishman, effective contributions to debate had not a prominent place. The present sometime Conservative law officer. Sir Edward Clarke, is the chief instance, since the days of Sir John Karslake, of a great orator in the Law Courts being a great debater at St. Stephen's. During the early eighties at a dinner in Queen Anne's Mansions given by an Irish Nationalist Member, the name of Charles Russell was a topic of 155 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD complimentary mention by Charles SteAvart Parnell, himself one of the guests. " We are all proud of him," said the Irish leader with unusual cordiality in his tone, not always noticeable. When the popular and parliamentary interest of the Irish Question in its latest phases was at the height, Charles Russell ex- plored his native land very thoroughly in a long vacation trip ; he showed himself in pamphlets and debates master of the whole subject; but his parlia- mentary services to his constituents or his country were chiefly the successful inculcation of patience upon the Nationalist leaders, the deepening of the Glad- stonian conviction that something must be done, and for mitigating some anti-Irish prejudices among his own social circle, one neither small in its circumference nor unrepresentative in its composition. As a loyal son both of his country and of the Church, Mr. Russell himself felt strongly on the matter. The accomplished and amiable lady, too, who presided with rare charm over his table, was in her convictions and in her femily associations committed to an almost romantic champion- ship to " Ireland for the Irish." Some of the patriotic enthusiasm animating the writings of Miss Rosa Mul- holland, either quickened the zeal of Mr. Russell, or prevented it from lapsing into languor. But like that of the crewhile Sir Henry James, the name of Charles Russell will not bo associated with any splendid 156 LORD RUSSELL OF KILLOWE^ achievement in the House of Commons at all on a level with those of an earlier Chief Justice, Cockburn, whose speech in the Don Pacifico debate almost sur- passed that of Palmerston himself, and could only be matched on the other side by the eloquence of Gladstone. Pass from this by way of contrast to a parlia- mentary incident with which, to the popular mind more closely than with any other, the memory of Charles Russell connects itself to-day. Late in the Session of 1881, a bored House was laughing over a diversion mercifully ordered for its relief, of the kind equally appreciated by children in a class-room and statesmen in a Senate. No stranger had been officially " spied " by Mr. Speaker or any one else ; still, such a stranger there had made his way to the Hoor of the House, and manifested every intention of taking his place on or under the Front Bench below the Ministerial gangway. The eye of the member for Dundalk was keener than that of the president of the Assembly or the Serjeant-at-Arms. A lawyer's instinct for decorum told Mr. Russell the new-comer had not been properly introduced, and prompted him to steps resulting in the stranger's disappearance from the Chamber. The intruder was the biggest black beetle which the oldest hdbitu6 had ever seen at Westminster. The historic insect deserves a place in the same collection with the cat that disturbed the sittings of the Synod of Dort, 157 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD or the mouse that, humbly emulating the Derby dog, crossed the floor of St. Stephen's in the debate on the Public Worship Bill of 1874.i During the lifetime of its clever projector, Charles Russell was retained as standing counsel for the Woo'ld newspaper. At the staff dinners at Greenwich, the advocate had the seat of honour next to the editor. As one watched the play of expression upon the mobile features of Edmund Yates, one knew that what litera- ture had gained the stage had lost. But, born actor as the editor was, the advocate scarcely looked less a one. No more histrionic face or manner than those of the Lord Chief ever appeared among the Bench of Judges. This quality finds its gratification in the unfailing attendance of the Judge at theatrical " first nights." Thus the equal of Serjeant Ballantine as a brilliant cross-examiner at the Bar, Lord Russell per- petuates the social tradition of theatrical tastes and patronage illustrated in our time, first by a Serjeant Murphy, more lately by his extraordinarily brilliant successor, who never did himself full justice, but who, though professionally dead some time before his decease in 1886, yet in his professionally defunct state as Counsel for the Guicowar of Baroda, received the exceptional fee of twenty thousand guineas. 1 This mouse was " spied " by Mr. Gathoine Hardy, who, with brilliant readiness, compared it to the Dort incident. 158 LORD RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN Reviewing these features in a strong character and a great career, one the better understands Mr. Benjamin's description of Charles Russell as a " complete " repre- sentative of his order. The facts also explain the popularity of Lord Russell's appointment to his present place. A very brilliant society lady, descended from a famous judge, used pleasantly to talk of her great- grandfather, the barber; for Lord St. Leonards (successively Chancellor — Ireland 1841, England 1852) was the son of a hairdresser. Lord Russell is not the only great judge who has commenced as solicitor. His contemporary, the brilliant Oxford scholar and parlia- mentary barrister presiding over the Divorce Courts, Sir F. H. Jeune, was never indeed of that branch of his profession, but in the offices of the well-known solicitors, Baxter, Rose, and Norton in Victoria Street, perfected by special opportunities of study a practical acquaintance with those legal details which in every aspect it becomes a pleader to know. Lord Russell's succession to Lord Coleridge was an encouragement, not only to all clever students at the Inns of Court, but to every industrious solicitor's clerk. It was also popular in the most varied sense, because the snuff-box and handkerchief of the new Lord Chief was not less well known to the crowds of Doncaster Heath or Epsom Downs, than to visitors to the House of Commons or spectators at the Law Courts. By 159 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD solicitors the promotion was received as a special compliment to the profession. Charles Kiissell had always strongly taken the solicitors* view that when money is paid into court, the jury should be informed of its amount. Other judges have held a different view, the present Lord Chief never. Gratifying to Bar and public as his success as a judge has been, it has almost excited the enthusiasm of the impassive race of equity solicitors. Though at the Bar his practice was principally confined to cases in Queen's Bench division, the Lord Chief of 1898, in the absence of one of the Lords Justices in the Court of Appeal has never failed, with as much of ease as of care, to master the details of the most intricate Chancery case that has ever vexed the souls of the professional experts of Gray's Inn. ICO LORD ASHBOURNE (MR EDWARD GIBSON) "Faith, it's Gibson's Cabinet altogether." This was the exulting description of Lord Salisbury's 1886 Administration, uttered by an Irish Nationalist who was as patriotically proud of the influence of the then Member for Dublin University as politically he was pledged to oppose him in the House. The Irish Lord Chancellor of 1898, so long known in the Lower House as Edward Gibson, is at once the product of the best social political forces of the past, and the transmitter of these forces to the future. Claudian's phrase, Stilichonis apex et cognita canities, so happily applied by the fourteenth Lord Derby to the first Duke of Wellington, was very soon after he had entered Parlia- ment prematurely and most picturesquely fitted to David Plunket's parliamentary colleague. Never did early white hairs set off to such advantage the square forehead and powerful jaw, both lit by the humorous 161 M PERSON'AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD eye of the son of Erin. For Lord Ashbourne is as true, in the best sense typical, an Irishman as Lord Rathmore or Lord Dufferin himself. His portrait therefore in this collection properly hangs next to that of Lord Russell. Two years after he had entered Parliament, in the debates, English as well as Irish, on various points of civil and religious statesmanship during the 1874 Government of Disraeli, Edward Gibson first became a personage at Westminster, a power in the country. In 1885, Lord Cairns having some years passed away, Mr. Gibson had become, as his compatriot already quoted proudly recognized, the business man of the Conservative party. Not only was his inclusion necessary to any constitutional combination which could be conceived, no statesman forming a Cabinet could effectually guard against the blunder of putting square pegs into round holes, or could ensure the social cement needful for the cohesion of heterogeneous political atoms, without Mr. Gibson's services. Whenever Lord Randolph Churchill, always the necessary though often the most intractable of party forces on his own side, saw difficulties ahead, or found the relations of himself and his friends impracticable, his exclamation to the loyal Wolff, or the sage and able Gorst, was — " Send for Gibson." The cry often echoed itself with Lord Salisbury. Thus in 1886, after 162 ', J LORD ASHBOURNE the constituencies had declared against Home Rule, but had also shown themselves to be well disposed to the idea of a national party, as explained by Churchill at Manchester early in the same year, it was clear that the House of Commons must be led by the latter-day organizer of the Disraelian idea of Tory democracy. Some months earlier, at a dinner in the Garrick Club, given by the then Mr. Plunket, after one of the count- less tiffs which broke the monotony of the intercourse between the two men, Randolph Churchill had been reconciled to Lord Salisbury. But in the summer following the Garrick dinner, the arrangements for the second Salisbury Cabinet of 1886 had advanced some way before the leadership of the Commons was offered formally to Churchill. Even in the preceding year (the June of 1885), when Sir M. Hicks-Beach's Beer and Spirit motion, supported by the Irish, threw out the Liberals, Lord Salisbury was thought to be in no hurry to suggest the qualifying of Churchill's popular and parliamentary power by official responsibility at the India Office. In the summer of 1886, all who had studied the national temper knew the only chance of keeping the Conservative Commons together was their leadership by the once " Member for Woodcock " (to quote Mr. Jacob Bright's accidental but felicitous description of the unmuzzleable young Tory). None of his con- 163 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD temporaries possessed a truer insight than Sir John Gorst into a political situation in Parliament and in the provinces. Considerably older than his Fourth Party leader, he was not the man prematurely to urge him into a place of pre-eminent responsibility. But in the year now spoken of, Sir John Gorst agreed with Sir Henry Wolff that no mere administrative post in the Cabinet, however high, would be to the party interest, the popular interest, and to the interest of Lord Randolph Churchill himself to fill. Knowing something of the incompatibility of his own with the Salsburian temper, conscious also of his technical ignorance of figures, though in reality not without some of the mathematical powers of his brother, the then Duke of Marlborough, who knew enough for a wrangler, Lord Randolph Churchill could not, in the summer of 1886, rightly be described as very keen for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. " I," he said, " am pledged uj) to the hilt to economy. My life would be one of perpetual war with the Admiralty and the Horse Guards. Unless Salisbury takes my views of retrenchment, I should only take the Exchequer one day, to leave it the next." The two friends assured him, for whom they revived the old description of Chatham (the terrible Cornet of Horse), that on all these matters the Premier would be amenable to management. At this juncture there 164 LORD ASHBOURNE fell from the lips of Churchill the words introducing this reminiscence. Mr. Gibson happened to be in the Carlton Club, the scene of the whole incident ; he was peacefully enjoying a muffin and a cup of tea in the library ; he sent back word by the waiter that he would come to the smoking-room before going back to dinner with Mrs. Gibson, then in Warwick Square. The sent-for Gibson undertook to see the Premier at the first expedient moment. Within four-and-twenty hours of that interview, it was announced officially that the erewhile leader of the Fourth Party would be the leader of the House of Commons. Seldom had the Front Conservative Bench in the House of Commons been so destitute as during the early eighties of men of high calibre. The politician who might have inspired the party with life and have redeemed them from discredit, Mr. Gathorne Hardy, had retired to another place as Lord Cranbrook. Worried and flurried by the Fourth Party on his flanks, by the Nationalists in his face or in his rear. Sir Staffi)rd Northcote never did himself justice. The presence of Mr. Gladstone always disconcerted, some- times appalled his old secretary and pupil ; whenever, as at this time often happened, for instance on the occasion of Mr. Ritchie's motion in the April of 1882, questions involving the principle of Free Trade were 165 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD opened, the chivalrous and courageous country gentle- man who filled Mr. Disraeli's old place, floundered hopelessly; he contradicted in one sentence what he had said in the preceding one ; he recanted his con- tradictions ; he contradicted his recantations. When the then Premier, Mr. Gladstone, exposed the incon- sistencies of his right honourable friend, the occupants of the bench below the Conservative gangway, instead of sympathizing, openly chuckled or cheered at their titular chief's discomfiture. In this situation, as fighter and debater, Mr. Gibson was a Conservative godsend. A lawyer in Parliament aspiring to fame as a states- man, may sometimes remind one of the low comedian of the stage who believes tragedy to be his forte. It is as if Paul Pry were struggling to fill the role of Hamlet or Othello. Up to this time Mr. Gibson's parliamentary fame had been eclipsed by his parlia- mentary colleague, his old contemporary and friend, the Mr. Plunket of that day. But in the House of Commons every one had forgotten Mr. Plunket to be a lawyer. No one could so forget Mr. Gibson. The reason of this was that the now Lord Rathmorc at an earlier stage, always a man of genius and eloquence, was in his habit and tastes above all things a dilettante. Hence, as it could not do in the case of Mr. Gibson, the House divested Mr. Plunket of all associations with Nisi Prius and the Four Courts. His was a 166 LORD ASHBOURNE graceful and lUgagi figure, ever welcome alike by Disraeli and Gladstone at Grillion's, that had always lounged brilliantly through existence. Like the second Charles, he might have been backed to saunter against any man, not only in England, but in Ireland and throughout the Celtic races of the world. An easy, amiable, and accomplished man of the world, he felt lightly on most things, but strongly and earnestly on some Irish affairs. He knew well the temper of the House of Commons; was always listened to with pleasure ; recalled the best traditions of the place ; never took part in a debate without lifting it to a higher level. A contrast more marked than that between the erewhile Mr. Edward Gibson and Mr. David Plunket could scarcely be conceived. The bright, easy, rather listless manner, the airy, brilliant method of treatment always to be associated with Lord Rathmore in the commoner stage of his evolution, had no counterpart in the severely lawyer-like bearing, the square-cut face, the heavy jaw, the upper lip a little overhung, the mouth opening and shutting as with a snap, emitting words like bullets sent from a catapult; such was Nature's clothing of the mental temper and the intellectual power of Lord Ashbourne as Mr. Gibson. His is a sledge-hammer sort of oratory; the syllables dropped one by one with a precision and force suggestive of a Nasmyth instrument, crushing with 167 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the same sureness a granite block or a filbert nut ; in a speaker of this kind the musical modulation of David Plunket's voice, the play of fancy brightening all his periods, would have been out of place. Not indeed that Lord Ashbourne, by whatever name he may be called, is without the poetry of the Celt or the humour of the Irishman. On the contrary, in private life no man was a more amusing companion; in the social intercourse of St. Stephen's no banter could have been happier or more Horatian in its temper than that with which Mr. Edward Gibson sometimes delighted not less its immediate object, Mr, Rowland Winn, the then Whip of the party, who died Lord St. Oswald; Mr. W. E. Forster and his mauvais sujets} and Mr., since Lord, Cross. That last statesman used to be fond of continental trips ; his later mastery of Parisian French was not then complete ; like his friends he appreci- ated the touch of Dublin brogue with which Mr. Gibson pressed on him the loan of a Baedeker when starting for a short French holiday. The qualities are as agreeably forthcoming in the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland as they were in the Member for Dublin University. They continue to delight all the Irish lawyers who attend Lord Ashbourne's well-planned social parties, and who recognize in Lady Ashbourne ■ The expression repeatedly introduced by Mr. Forster, when as Irish Secretary introducing his Coercion Bill. 168 LORD ASHBOURNE a mistress of the social art, as well as the most gracious and kindly of her sex. These lighter qualities are accompanied by all the graver attributes, the very best of their order, traditionally suited to Lord Ashbourne's office, and representative of the brightest periods and the noblest influences of the race. Already such examples as those of the two friends, Lord Ashbourne and Lord Kathmore, have borne their fruits with a younger generation. The standard of ability and culture with the Irish Bar is maintained at its best height even to-day. The men who are now rising up will not hereafter fall below in respect of breeding and capacity the standard of their prede- cessors. If particular proof were wanted of a general truth, it would be enough to mention Mr. Dunbar Barton, who is not only Lord Rathmore's nephew, but with his pleasant Irish manner as speaker and writer a reproduction of Lord Rathmore's self when he was Mr. David Plunket, and therefore a latter-day deposi- tary of those quickening forces historically as well as actually to be associated with Edward Gibson not less than with his friend. 169 THE ROTHSCHILDS " Rothschild, the Jew, waiting to have the honour of an audience with me in the hall." In Lord Holland's Memoirs, the most copious and exact of all sources for the social history of the first half of this century, the foregoing words are the only recognition of the element to-day so prominent and powerful in our social as well as in our financial system. Even Charles Greville, who, as a sporting man, must have known the family, scarcely allows his references to them to go beyond some remarks on the often-described and univers- ally known house that was the cradle of the race in Frankfort. Since 1863, Lord Holland's words just quoted have only a historical interest. No con- siderable Jew, certainly no Rothschild, to-day waits in the ante-room of peers, cabinet ministers, or princes. These have become the persons who wait for the honour of invitations from the Jews. The genius of Disraeli reflected some lustre on the race. The 170 THE ROTHSCHILDS Rothschilds, following the Goldsmids, whom George III. visited at Sheen, had been a power in the land before Disraeli, Their Sunday parties at Gunnersbury were famous during the same period as those at Holland and Gore House. Superficial observers pre- dicted Lord Rosebery would do himself no good by his marriage with a daughter of the tribe. As it turned out, nothing after the Derby of Ladas and the championship of the Daily Chronicle helped him more to his short Premiership than a connection that gave him not only wealth, but a friend in the most popular of European newspapers as well. It might almost seem doubtful if the political career of any Gentile can be said auspiciously to have begun, before, as the marriages of the most rising members of Parliament on either side show, some link indirectly has been formed with the Semitic potentates in City and State. Proud of his race though he was, Disraeli more than once disclaimed any special obligation to this family; he had even been known humorously to protest in a moment of pleasant pique : " There really must be a razzia." Such a proposal is about as practicable as a project for a public subscription to emigrate the entire City to the Holy Land. Some unsophisticated Protestants, in the country, talk of the London press as being controlled by Papists. The latter do indeed exercise with much skill the subtly 171 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD permeating influences of their accomplished pens, but the chief power of the press is with the members of the family now spoken of After Henry Reeve's, the greatest editor of the Times preferred no opinion on public affairs to that of Baron Lionel Rothschild. The Daily Telegraph, patriotic as are its tone and princi- ples, began a movement which has continued till, if Eastern capital were withdrawn, several excellent newspapers might cease to appear. The Times possesses the most rus6 and well-informed of Paris correspondents. No one ever imputed it as a dis- advantage to the Chevalier de Blowitz that, notwith- standing his territorial patronymic, he is a compatriot of the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds, like the Goldsmids and the Monte- fiores, owe the consideration they have won in this country, not only to their philanthropy in the land where they have become domiciled, but to a certain dignified pride in that ancient race from which they are sprung, and which gave to Europe its apostles and its religion. Their wealth, apart from their tact in its management, would not have secured to them their present place among the personal forces of the period. Unless the essential qualities of their house had been fairly perpetuated from one generation to another, their position would not have been maintained as it is to-day. 172 THE ROTHSCHILDS In Baron Lionel Rothschild, the latter-day founder of the dynasty now dealt with, there were concentrated attributes which all classes of Englishmen instinctively appreciate. His shrewdness, as has been seen, made him the adviser on cosmopolitan affairs of Delane, the independent editor of an incorruptible journal, as well as the confidant of Disraeli. His hounds published and popularized his name throughout the south of Eng- land ; his bounty in the suburb where his London property lay, cause the name of the master and mistress of Gunnersbury to be remembered pleasantly by villagers to this day. The impotence of suspicion itself to touch the running of his horses, or the management of his stable, secured for his victories on the Turf not less of popularity than has waited in these days on the successes of Lord Rosebery or of the Prince of Wales. The " Baron's" judgment in things artistic earned him authority among connoisseurs ; the opening of his galleries in town and country to all who had any interest in their contents, stimulated other collectors of art and sculpture to take the public into a like partnership with them so far as the enjoyment of art treasures is concerned. No one of Lionel Rothschild's sons combines all the qualities of his father ; each has his share of hereditary gifts distributed among the whole family. The peer who in 1898 is the head of his house, is not in 173 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD general ability inferior to his father ; he took honours in the Mathematical Trij^os at Cambridge ; his business in New Court has gained from his industry at Cam- bridge. Although a sportsman himself, and a keeper of hounds, he has left to his youngest brother the Turf representation of his house. Mr. Leopold Rothschild lives when at home in the perfectly simple style of an English country gentleman, and in a little house under the shadow of the palaces belonging to his kinsmen in that county which those kinsmen have nearly bought entire. Equally distinct is the part played by the second brother, Alfred. His pen-and- ink portrait is painted at full length by his friend, Disraeli, in the pages of Lothair. For the second of the Rothschilds, and not, as has been said, Mr. Chris- topher Sykes, is the grave young man " leaving a prevailing impression of tawniness" on all who meet him ; he, therefore, it is who is represented as horrified in the novel when " St. Aldegonde," otherwise the then Lord Hartington, and present Duke of Devonshire, passed by all the artistic triumphs of the chef, and called for cold beef. This well-known amphitryon of Seamore Place, a shrewd and kindly man about town, vindicates the claim of his family to supply to art and letters a Maecenas of the period. Lavish the display of wealth made by all these rich men is ; without what is called lavishness their treasures would be invisible ; 174 THE ROTHSCHILDS instead of hearing about aggressive profusion and so forth, these children of fortune would be called " sordid screws." Encouraged by the example of these Roths- childs, their cousin, Ferdinand, has established himself in a palace which yields to no rival as proof of the creative power of wealth. In that British province that is to-day an appanage of his family, Ferdinand Rothschild, in the centre of a barren, sandy, treeless tract, has raised a French chateau, glistening with gold without, furnished as a palace of art within. Invitations to the Waddesdon parties means that the invited is a rising member of his profession, is coming to the front in diplomacy or politics. Mere pretenders seldom make their way to this house, whose hospitali- ties can be denied by no one to be judicious. That the English Rothschilds have made themselves a social force of the first order their enemies admit. That they have conciliated to themselves popularity alone few would assert. The fact is, their social activity and ascendency have provoked even before this, 1898, a good deal of soreness. Nor is this suqDrising when one remembers what are the social forces which the Semitic success has disestablished. The constantly increasing cost of modern life, the successive bad years in English agriculture, the constant buying up of the estates of small country gentlemen by prosperous traders with a taste for rural life ; the immense addi- 175 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD tions of late to the expense of a London season, the inordinate expectations at more modest tables on the part of guests, accustomed as is said to the Rothschild banquets ; these things have largely placed London society out of the reach of the country gentlemen and their families for whom as a relief to the session the London season was originally organized. Beyond doubt the wife and daughters of the British squire are more sorely put to it than ever before to make pin- money do all its needful work. The origin of all these evils is now found in the countrymen of the Roths- childs. Fifty or a hundred years ago the same com- plaint was raised against the new-rich of purely British birth. It is an obvious truth that not the social competition instituted by the capitalists of any one race has produced the passion for display and the extravagance now complained of. A very able writer of the day on financial subjects, periodically takes up his powerful pen against the loan-mongers of Europe. Even Mr. A. J. Wilson admits that nations would not be encouraged to outrun the con- stable unless the foreign rentier and his English equivalents added to their incomes out of the same movement which aggrandized the raisers of loans, who mostly happen to be Jews. If, therefore, as many honestly think, something like the same impatience of Hebrew capital which has been 176 THE ROTHSCHILDS witnessed on the Seine or the Spree may one day show itself on the Thames, the true objective of the move- ment will be not the particular family of Rothschild ; not even the race to which they belong. According to the view now taken, the cause of the social corruption among us is not the nationality of the men who have the money, but the Machiavellian influences of the money itself. Now, in sober sense, ethnic prejudices apart, is there much to choose between the social amenity or the reverse of the newly-enriched Hebrew or Gentile ? As a matter of fact, the Gentile vulgarian is likely to be the less acceptable of the two, simply because he is the slower to assimilate the ideas that give grace to an environment of material prosperity. Not only the art collections of successful traders, near or in the great commercial capitals of the North, but the artistic intelligence of their owners have long since rendered obsolete the reproaches cast in old stage-plays on the new-rich of British stock. The Jew intellect in these later days has developed a quick receptiveness, and an alert insight into the material of intellectual culture which often outstrips the mental habits of the Anglo-Saxon race. The Rothschilds themselves are only one of several Semitic families that have shown this characteristic facility in adapting themselves to the social condition fortune has given them, and in assimilating the prejudices and habits of the better-to- 177 N PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD do classes of their adopted country. " Society " amuses itself with stories of the corrupting influence of Israel- itish men about town in relation to persons whose slender pocket-money places them at the disposal of the devouring stranger. That is the sort of gossip which may be ignored here. But if in polite life subsidies are sometimes dealt out to impecunious gentility by well-to-do cavaliers from the City, is the quarter whence such supplies come more Hebrew than Gentile ? Very likely the present age is too material for its spiritual well-being. But the complaint then, to be just, should be not against some of the owners of the monstrous wealth, but against the presence of that wealth itself. The upper classes of Englishmen, the country gentlemen, the smaller nobility to whom a few bad seasons and several unlet farms mean pecuniary inconvenience, have felt most painfully the rivalry of Asiatic capitalists in town and country. Nor are such persons likely to have received all the consideration that good breeding might desire from their competitors in the race for gold. Centuries of oppression, confiscation, proscription, and injustice have weakened the capacity of the Irish for self- government. The treatment during an equally long time accorded by Christendom to the Jews has not of course bred in them a too delicate consideration for the feelings of the community in whose midst they 178 THE ROTHSCHILDS happen to be settled. Heine, by birth a Jew as well as a German, by taste a Parisian, has put this with equal truth and bitterness. Every institution, class, or section of the community which is a depository of real power is sure periodically to provoke something in the nature of a rising against it. Hence the latter-day grumbling against the aggressively opulent strangers within our gates. Of such the Rothschilds are a type. But they may really afford to disregard these outbursts of popular petulance, as well as the House of Commons, equally abused, may ignore the recurrent attacks upon it. That for nations East or West, South or North, it is well that, not less than individuals, they should pay their way, and avoid the money-lender if they wish to preserve their independence, is a truism which all will allow, and which in the March of 1898 {Contemporary Review) Mr, A. J. Wilson enforced with equal know- ledge and power. Even this authority, however, from his great experience, only confirms the propositions laid down in the course of the present remarks. For he expressly speaks of the loan-mongering tyranny exercised by the " golden international," as composed not of Jews exclusively, but of all men, of whatsoever nationality, who invest their money in the public debts of civilized communities ; headed by the powerful banks and bankers of the leading capitals of Europe. In the Middle Ages, as one is reminded, Philip le Bel of 179 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD France could destroy the Knights Templars as a short way of reckoning with the Order which gave him his bankers. No one has yet suggested dealing with the British Rothschilds in this mediaeval method. So long as these naturalized aliens consort on equal terms with English gentlemen ; so long as they send their sons to English schools and universities, their foreignness is not likely to be of a very marked or aggressive sort. There was no bacon in all Buckinghamshire comparable with that cured on the farms which the Jew, Disraeli, owned. It really might seem the more safe, as well as dignified, course to accept the situation without quarrelling with the " wealth of nations." If to-day English society, high, middle, and low, is subject to a despotism of Hebrew wealth which it is impotent to shake off, it may perhaps be the best plan to extract all possible consolation from the fact of our fetters being at least gilded ; — perhaps, as the cynically-minded might add, to see whether the Briton cannot spoil the Israelite as of old the Israelites spoiled the Egyptians. La concurrence est trop forte, has been the reason given for the absence of Jews from modem Athens. When one remembers the proverbial invincibility of the canny Abcrdonian on the Stock Exchange in all money bargains, one may hope that even the Gentile lamb is not absolutely defenceless against the Hebrew wolf To find fault 180 THE ROTHSCHILDS with these persons who would seem to be indispensable, because their ideas of magnanimity and of manner do not invariably coincide with English ideals, would be much the same as if the victim of jaundice were to forswear sovereigns because the colour of the coin reminded him of his complaint. In 1886 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, a very typically British Chancellor of the Exchequer, above all things an English country gentleman, admitted in the House of Commons that without the Rothschild loans advanced on very slight security, the Government of Egypt could not have been carried on. If the land of the Pharaohs be as some would seem to think the brightest jewel in the British Crown, indignation from the polite classes, who support the Administration that will not let Egypt go, against the family on whose gold rests our dominion on the Nile cannot be very genuine ; it is not likely to be anything more than a passing fit of insular spleen. In 1863 the Prince of Wales was the first to perceive that the fabric of polite society in his capital and his country was becoming so vast and necessarily so cos- mopolitan as to render it politic, or even necessary, for the heads of society to recognize frankly the new elements of power. From that date began the estab- lishment of strangers from beyond the Atlantic or the eastern corner of the Mediterranean in our national 181 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD polity. No one now doubts the wisdom or the dignity of that step, nor is there much likelihood of a national resolve to revoke it. The social position of the Roths- childs, as of other prosperous members of their race, is of course much more' favourable in London than in any other European capital. That is, amongst other things, because since the fall of the Second Empire in France, London, from being an insular city of business, has become the pleasure metropolis of the world. Unless that is to be undone, the position among us of the individuals and the nationality now described is not likely seriously to be altered. 182 LORD GLENESK Of the part played by King's College School in moulding the personal forces of the period, something in these pages has already been said. This was also the school of a man who, in far-reaching activity and influence in his own sphere, is second to no scholar of that foundation. Algernon Borthwick, now Lord Glenesk, during many years has been the doyen of the London press. His newspaper — the Morning Post — founded in 1772, is the oldest of all the dailies. The Scotch associations of the Post remind one of the extent to which that nationality has dominated the journalism of London. In Thackeray's Pendennis, an historical picture of London newspaper life in early Victorian days, the nationality most prominent is Irish. The Captain Shandon (alias Dr. Maginn), who in the Fleet Prison wrote the prospectus of the Pall Mall Gazette, in answer to Mr. Wagg's sneering question, " Why the title ? " proudly answers that its editor was 183 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD born in Cork, its sub-editor at Waterford, defiantly continuing : " If that won't satisfy you, you know my name." " And," in allusion to his chronic captivity for debt, "I know your address," rejoined Wagg. Apart from the stock of its proprietors, whose shrewdness has made the journal a success, the Daily Td&gra'ph is, after the versatile and vigorous George Augustus Sala, indebted for its literary traditions and mark to a Scotchman and an Irishman respectively. For even Sala would not have won for the newspaper the journalistic mark it made under the skilful management of Thornton Hunt, with James Macdonell, Scotch, and Herbert Stack, Irish, as writers. A like story would be told by other editorial chairs could they write their autobiographies. James Grant, the well-known editor of the Morning Advertiser, who came in with the century, went out on the eve of the eighties, was a native not of Aberdeen, the birthplace of Macdonell of the Telegraijh, of Cook the founder of the Saturday Heview, but of the still more northern Elgin. The family of Borthwick is as purely Scotch as any of the Grants. While the mother of the newspaper peer was a Northumbrian, his father, the Conservative member for Evesham, was a familiar figure in the political society of London fifty or sixty years ago ; had been, not editor, but, to express it more accurately by a French word without an exact English equivalent, 184 LORD GLENESK gSrant of the Morning Post during the years between '49 and '52. The editor all that time, as for long afterwards, was another undoubted as well as famous Scot, Sir James Mackintosh ; he had been bom in 1765 at Aldourie on Loch Ness; like many more recent and less eminent of his countrymen, after having taken a Scotch degree in medicine he started in London journalism ; almost continuously he edited the Morning Post, with S. T. Coleridge as one of his early con- tributors, till a not very long time before his death in 1832. This of course is the man whose literary fame rests chiefly on the extraordinarily acute and brilliant reply to Burke's reflections on the French Revolution published in 1791, and thus following pretty closely an answer of the third earl, generally known as Citizen Stanhope. His forensic fame comes from his defence of Peltier for libelling Bonaparte. His parliamentary place was won during his seven years as M.P. for Nairn. After his return from Bombay, while in the House he was member of the Board of Control in Lord Grey's Government, and was held by Macaulay to have been the most effective supporter of the Grey Reform Bill. On the eve of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat young Algernon Borthwick was sent to Paris as London correspondent for the newspaper which his father managed. He had already been with tutors in that 185 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD city, 1841-43, before he went to the University School. He could, therefore, speak the language of the country, unlike some of his colleagues, though not that par- ticular colleague who represented the Globe, Frank Mahonyi (Father Prout); the author of many verses in French standing the test of comparison with Beranger. Mr. Peter Borthwick's death caused his son's return to London, in the year following the Great Exhibition, to take up his father's administrative work on the news- paper. By a series of those unforeseen shiftings that occur in most journals, that have in later years made Mr. W. H. Mudford the editor of the Standard, as before him they had made J. T. Delane the editor of the Times, Mr. Borthwick gradually concentrated in himself the entire management as well as more recently the sole proprietorship of the paper. Notwithstanding its Whig associations in ancient history, the Morning Post of modern times has always been Tory in State, high in Church. The chief supporter of Palmerston in foreign policy, like its readers in Parliament, the journal disapproved of the Palmerstonian bishops as strongly as did Samuel Wilberforce or George Anthony Denison. This record does not exhaust the newspaper activity ' Before this, Mahony, who had been educated with the Jesuits in Paris, under tlie editorship of Charles, Dickens, was corre- spondent of tlie Daily Ntws in Rome. 186 LORD GLENESK of the man. A pioneer of the daily press, he has been the founder not only of a journal, but of an era in the weekly press. The Owl was started by him in con- junction with James Stuart Wortley and Evelyn Ashley. Laurence Oliphant wrote only in the first few numbers ; the surviving Lord Wharncliffe wrote in all. With him legend or history joins the names of Bromley Davenport as of several others still fortunately living, but unnecessary here to name. The Owl dinners, whereon the writers liked to lavish their earnings, were the earliest of the literary banquets which have become the mode for the polite gentlemen and ladies who write with ease and dine with regularity at the fag-end of the century. The paper might have lasted till now, but in 1870 Algernon Borthwick married. He ceased to be absolutely master of his own time. Among his bright contributors there was none to whom the staff united in tendering the same obedience that his light hand had secured. Though the Owl itself is dead, not only its influences, but its undoubted offspring live. Thomas Gibson Bowles, though never one of the inner cabinet of the Owl administration, wrote in the paper; he perpetuated many of its qualities in Vanity Fair. A next-door neighbour of Mr. Bowles in the St. James's Street Chambers where the two were then living, Mr. Arthur a Beckett, developed another aspect of the Oivl in his 187 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD clever Tomahawh. After this came the so-called Society papers of to-day. Grenville Murray's Queen's Messenger ended in a personal squabble, ridiculously exaggerated as it has been by those who did not, like the present writer, witness the incident outside the Conservative Club. Grenville Murray himself, joining Edmund Yates, supplied many of the elements in the success of the Wm^ld, as well as of the crop of prints which on the same lines sprang up about the same time. These journals gave readers of all classes the pleasurable and perfectly harmless sensation, while reading their gossip and their comments, of being in better society than they entered in the flesh, and of overhearing much entertaining small talk without leaving their suburban hearths. Epoch - making is therefore the epithet that may be correctly applied to Lord Glenesk's historic Owl. If none of the copies fully come up to the original, that is because a second Algernon Borth- wick has not shown himself The house in Piccadilly, where he now spoken of lives, is the same as that outside which Byron, on an afternoon noted in his journal, mounted his horse, rode across the Park to the House of Lords, to be received with howls by the mob in Palace Yard because of his supposed ill-behaviour to his wife. The society to be met with in 139 Piccadilly to-day is much of the same quality that Byron might have gathered round him had ho cared; 188 LORD GLENESK the best and brightest of its sort, though a little less mixed than in some of his moods might have amused the poet. Since Delane's day, the present owner of this house is the one man who has lived in as close touch as his j^redecessor with the persons who make history at home and abroad, and whom all of these persons regard in the not easily translatable French as un homme s&icux. As in all newspaper enterprises of the time, so in all the political movements most useful to his party, the initiative and energy of Lord Glenesk may be traced. Without him the Primrose League, which no one can deny to be a political power in the land, would never have been thoroughly organized. Outside those bright, white rooms, furnished so plenti- fully with the mirrors that Disraeli declared to be to a room what a lake is to a landscape ; without the inventive tact of the mistress of that establishment, the meetings of the League might transact less real business than they do. As Lord Glenesk is the first newspaper peer among the personal forces of the time, so is Sir Edward Lawson the first newspaper baronet ; one who in vigour of professional initiative, in representative force, and keenness in perceiving the movements of the times, is not behind his professional comrade. With these names one must bracket the original of George Eliot's " Grandcourt " in Daniel Deronda, Mr, Henry 189 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Labouchere. He has been the first to show how good a school for newspaper writing the literary labour of diplomatic chanceries, in the case of a receptive pupil, may be. He has also been the first to unite Anglo- Saxon earnestness of political purpose with the realism which rises on the other side of the Atlantic, and the antithetic badinage or drollery whose native home is on the Seine. Whether he be a good parliamentarian doing himself injustice by incorrigible flippancy, or a raconteur who wastes in Parliament and press gifts intended for social talk alone, his absence would go far to eclipse the gaiety of St. Stephen's. If, as he calls himself, he be a Little Englander, in his jauntiest sallies, by the backbone of shrewd sense traversing his banter, he shows himself, spite of his Huguenot descent, a true Englishman. His good things, real or legendary, would furnish forth a volume. Two of the most authentic and perhaps least familiar must serve as specimens of the rest. During his attacM-shv^ to our Washington Legation, an importunate Briton calling a second or third time to see the minister, when told he was not at home, thought he would like to wait till that minister's return. " By all means," said the bland attache. After having sat expectantly some two hours, H.B.M.'s waiting subject began to fidget in his chair. " Do you think ho will be much longer ? " " It all depends upon the weather in mid-Atlantic," was the 190 LORD GLENESK unruffled reply; " for Lord Lyons left for Europe last night." Before this, ordered against his will from Paris or another Western capital to St. Petersburg, and being refused special travelling allowances, the attacM, stag- gering under an immense knapsack with a pilgrim's staff such as Bunyan's "Christian" might have handled, started from the Embassy, having previously told his chief his family would hold his Sovereign's Government responsible if he succumbed to the toils and perils of so long a journey, made, because of poverty, on foot. Returning home, he was congratulated by a country- man outside the Houses of Parliament on a magnificent speech made by his father in the House of Lords. " So relieved we shall be all to know where he is ; for as my father has been dead some years, I have long felt a little anxious as to his present whereabouts." To keep a theatre is said in Disraeli's Lotliair to be the high mode for swells. The influences of Mr. Labouchere, Lord Glenesk, and Sir Edward Lawson suggest that, for theatre, one should read newspaper. 191 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE " The ambulant eyes and brains of their country." This was the phrase in which, at the time he secured his committee of inquiry into, resulting in the partial reorganization of, the Diplomatic Service, the attaches and secretaries of our foreign Embassies were described by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff. The functions thus indicated have long been divided by the servants of the Sovereign abroad with the representatives of the press. At any moment on an emergency, Printing House Square could undertake and execute a commission for supplying the human furniture to our European Chanceries. The best-informed person ever met by the present writer was an English gentleman some years ago living, and perhaps living still, on a small private estate he had acquired in North Italy. Though born with social opportunities for a front place in both, he 192 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE had not for a long time mixed in the life of capitals and Courts; he had kept up his school and college classics ; he was not a great scholar in the approved philological interpretation of the word; nor was he master of many modern languages. Yet he combined with extensive information on central subjects of con- temporary or past interest ready and accurate know- ledge not only of the events, but of the individual or general causes of the events of the moment throughout the world. He was not, nor did he mysteriously pretend to be, in the confidence of, or in correspondence with, sovereigns, statesmen, ambassadors, or any other exceptionally well-placed and presumably intelligent persons. His manner was frank and simple. He pointed to two or three as yet unopened and uncut copies of the Times just arrived from England. His plan, as it turned out, was to receive this newspaper daily from London, nor to let a full week pass without having read and mastered, as a careful undergraduate masters for his schools, the literary contents of each issue. From the first line of the summary, through all the leading articles, book reviews, theatrical notices, letters to the editor, telegrams from every part of the world, the descriptions of " Our Own Correspondents," whether covering three columns or concentrated into six lines ; not a word of these was missed, or was even cursorily glanced at, by this industrious and knowledg- 193 o PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD able man. At home in England, or wherever he had interests to distract him from his task, he would not, he said, be able to read his Times, would be tempted to read it superficially, or to meditate on it less devoutly, and would thus lapse into the number of those whom he called newspaper sciolists, while himself modestly claiming to be in his way a newspaper scholar. The person now mentioned is only an unusually perfect specimen of a class, by no means uncommon abroad, which with life lived at a little slower pace, might be more familiar in England. Charles Dickens first made the modern magazine as it is now understood, by dealing in it with many topics before his day left to the newspapers. His Rouse- hold Words and All the Year Round successively became the training-schools of the first newspaper correspondents of their epoch. " The Roving English- man " of Grenville Murray in the periodical edited by the author of David Coppcrjield, was the title of a series of essays on foreign places, persons and events which afterwards rendered their writer such an acces- sion to the Daily Neivs, Telegraph, or Pall Mall Gazette. These, too, together with William Howard Russell's and Louis J. Jennings' ^ letters from beyond seas, laid ^ The particular piece of writing here referred to is a word- picture of a Bengal cyclone by Jennings, who, having been a Times leader-writer, highly valued by his chiefs, became Times 194 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE the foundations of an entire department of journalism that is the special product of our own period. For a time the electric wire and the great telegraphic societies, principally of course Renter's, threatened to supersede the special correspondent ; he was not dis- couraged. His skill and courage have been rewarded by the retirement into the background of the de- spatches of the foreign agencies, and by the increasing recognition of a staff of ubiquitous " specials " as primarily indispensable to any daily or weekly print. Even newspapers whose space has to be more econom- ized than that of the Times rely entirely, as the case of the Daily Mail shows, upon their own corre- spondents at the headquarters of the special events in progress. The extraordinary completeness within the narrowest compass of the war despatches of Mr. G. W. Steevens during the Anglo-Egyptian conflicts of 1898 is only one of the later developments of the perfection to which the journalistic methods learnt in the school of Dickens have been brought. In this age of Iliads in a nutshell, of treatises con- densed into a chapter, and of columns compressed into a paragraph, the "journal of the City," as the Times is still called abroad, has of course been obliged to curtail its narratives by writers on the spot. correspondent in India, where he penned what attracted at the time universal attention as a masterpiece of graphic description. 195 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The popularity of the newspaper has not diminished in consequence. Why foreigners persist in calling the Times "the journal of the City" admits of an explana- tion equally creditable and simple. Through all its editorial and managerial vicissitudes, the newspaper more faithfully on the whole than any of its contem- poraries reflects the cool common-sense and deliberate judgment of the upper, middle, and tolerably substan- tial classes, whose ideas in the long run find expression in the quotations of the mart and in the policy of the Cabinet. Earlier during the Victorian age, when the executive of Printing House Square was headed by J. T. Delane and Mowbray Morris, the Times had only to maintain a position not so much won as forced upon it by events. The penny press came into existence as a practical power only when the abolition of the Ad- vertisement Duty in 1853 was followed by the repeal of all newspaper taxes in 1861. Its cheaper and younger rivals have stimulated the older Times to more enterprising service. They have not affected its national position. The Times to-day, as its " Letters to the Editor " show, remains for the Briton at large the one and only analogue of the Delphic oracle of classical Greece. Many of its contemporaries have as much news, or shine with even more brightness. None of them possess in the complete and universally recognized 196 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE form of the Times small-print " Letters to the Editor," signs of the time which enable the student of his period to place his finger on the pulse of public opinion. To older persons, the paper is in a special sense in- dispensable if only because its obituary is the com- pletest daily death-roll extant; with advancing years it becomes more a social duty not to skip these entries. Being all in these ways as it is to Englishmen, the Times is not less, but more than ever the quotidian encyclopedia of all thoughtful persons if not in Latin, yet certainly in Teutonic Europe. The vitalizing power of tradition, which in all businesses counts for so much, in none more so than in the businesses of literature, is not enough to explain the inherited pre-eminence of the journal. That the editor of the Times at any moment will be a man of first-rate ability, and that its writers will be competent, may be said as safely as that the highest political capacity available is collected into the company of Privy Councillors at any date, or that in an age of high pressure no profession offers an asylum for pretenders. To such a position State secrets in some guise or other gravitate by a natural law. So far as any living memory can run, the Times, in its resolve to be broadly representative, has seldom lacked an inspiration embodied in some gentleman other than its editor or that editor's most highly-placed 197 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD oflficial friend. The final refutation of the story of a fashionable lady having sold Delane the news of Peel's conversion to Free Trade in 1846 was not wanted to establish the incorruptness of the journal. This dis- tinction is shared by the Times with all its contem- poraries of repute. A " reptile press " cannot be too broadly stated to be unknown in England. The great newspaper has always had advisers, or, as some might call them, inspirers, outside its office. Periodically one reads the announcement of a forthcoming biography of J. T. Delane, or of the greatest of the modern Walters. For some reason or other the announcement is never fulfilled ; probably it never will be. While these lines are being written there are rumours of a Life of Henry Reeve, once editor of the Edinburgh Review, as in the course of composition. If this be so, and the book should ever actually appear, unless it is entirely to belie its title, it must perforce give the public many glimpses into the dark interior of the cabinet of Print- ing House Square. Though not like Charles Greville, whose papers he edited, a sportsman, the Registrar of the Privy Council resembled his friend, its Clerk, in being a thorough man of the world of the graver and more cultivated sort, an equal hater of mere frivolity. That knowledge is power could not be shown more conclusively than by Reeve's relations with the Times during the two decades between 1850 and 1870. On 198 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE all subjects the editor did not dissemble his deference to the judgment of this friend. In matters of foreign policy especially, the Edinlurgh Review editor almost inspired the newspaper; once a week, usually on Tuesday, he himself wrote an article for it on some aspect of that question which special study and ex- ceptional opportunities had made peculiarly his own. The two men possessed so entirely each other's confi- dence, and lived in so close intimacy as unconsciously to have assimilated some of the features of each other's manner. When the two were together, it was not always easy to know which at any moment held the ball of conversation, as they passed it to and fro. So far as one knows, this intimacy of two able and responsible men, unique probably in the history of the London press, is without any parallel instance in Printing House Square itself since the two men have passed away. After Delane's death, no one at all conversant with the subject doubted for one moment that incomparably Delane's best successor had been found in Thomas Chenery, " A professor who has a Chair," was Disraeli's comment on the appointment ; that was only one aspect of the new editor. Like his colleague Antonio Gallenga, Chenery had long in more capacities than one been on the literary staff of the paper. He had not only written articles and acted as foreign corre- 199 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD spondent under Delane ; he had often travelled with and always enjoyed the personal intimacy of his chief. He united indeed the tastes of a scholar with some- thing of the scholar's shyness of demeanour, though he was socially smart enough for Lady Randolph Churchill's very smart drawing-room. But he was a man of many accomplishments, of wide interests, of varied and accurate knowledge, able to hold his o^vn in discussions on music with Davison, the musical critic of the paper ; on the drama with John Oxenford, the veteran critic of the play. The shrewdness of his insight into character may be judged from the fact of his having been the first to foresee the far- reaching influence Lord Randolph Churchill was to exercise on the fortunes and the temper of modern Conservatism. The opportunities which fell to Disraeli of observing the younger statesman after he had made his mark in 1880 were few. They only drew from the veteran such contemptuous estimates as " Dilke and water," or such hortatory platitudes as "Those who are to lead, must first serve." Against this estimate Chenery one day at the Athena3um Club, talking with the statesman, adhered to his own view that the scion of the Churchills would go further than any of his own generation. When in 1884 Chenery died at his house in Serjeant's Lin, the same in which Delane had lived 2U0 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE before him, among the countless and mostly baseless rumours as to the new editor, was a report that the vacant chair would be filled by one of the ablest and most seasoned members of the Civil Service, as well as a renowned man about town of the more intellectual sort. Than the late Henry Calcraft no Englishman of his time knew better every department of the motley organization, itself the product of democracy and wealth known as "society." During many years no Mayfair or St. James's dinner-table was filled satis- factorily if he were absent. No social news of the hour could be authentic without his imprimatur. No debutant of either sex who had not his acquaintance could be in the social running. This was the lighter and better known aspect of the man. Calcraft had in him, however, that stronger stuff not wanting to the Charles Grevilles or other men of the world of an earlier day, nor ever absent from those sons of fashion who eventually become social oracles. The jDosition of his family within the serious and innermost circles of Whiggism was shown by his election to Brooks' Club at the same tender age as Charles James Fox. When Lord John, then Earl Russell, was fading quietly away at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, Henry Calcraft was one of the very few persons of any generation, certainly the only one of his own gener- 201 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD ation, who regularly visited, was always welcomed by, the Whig patriarch in his seclusion. Thence probably he had to hurry back to London that he might meet Lord Beaconsfield at dinner and take him to the play.i But though, as throughout was to be expected, the authorities of the Times followed the Chenery precedent after Delane, and promoted to the vacant chair the strong and accomplished man who in 1898 fills it, an unofficial connection of Calcraffc with the newspaper was only severed by his death in 1896. If since then no relations of this sort have existed between Printing House Square and "the outside world, an explanation might be found in the extinction of the type of earnest and responsible flaneur represented by Lord Beacons- field's Lyceum companion. As a fact, however, many of the services once rendered by Henry Reeve, or on a very much less important scale by Henry Calcraft — neither of them officially attached to the newspaper — are to-day performed within the establishment itself, or at least by those retained on its permanent staff. G. W. Smalley is the name which indicates the * e. g. The Corsican Brothers, when reproduced by Mr. Irving at the Lyceum. This consumuiate melodrama infinitely delighted Lord Beaconsfield, who, sending for the actor-manager between the acts, complimented him on its matchless mounting, his own acting, adding pleasantly, "It reminds me of many incidents of my own career." 202 PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE establishment of the American of high culture in London society. The institution has been rendered so familiar by the subsequent instances of Mr. Henry James, or Mr. Marion Crawford, as to excite no attention to-day. Long after Mr. Smalley's remarkable letters from London to the New Yoi'h Tribune were appreciated by the most cultivated of professional hosts and host- esses (conspicuous among these being his friends Dr. and then Mrs. Priestley), these noticeable studies of English life were little known to the statesmen and stateswomen, high in place, who gradually secured the Anglo-American writer as their guest. Then followed a noticeable and highly productive intimacy between this able Anglicized American on the one hand, and representative Times proprietors or successive editors on the other. To-day Mr. Smalley is correspondent of the great newspaper at Washington ; submarine cables render his counsel scarcely less accessible than if he were in his London club ; one may safely add not less welcome. Another instance of the truth just stated is the Paris representative of the Times, who enjoys more cosmopolitan notoriety than any other writer for the press now living. More the opposite of English in all respects than Mr. Smalley, the Chevalier Blowitz is at once the most puissant and mysterious among the personal forces felt to-day upon the press. His territorial patronymic comes to him from the little 203 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD village in Servia where he was born. His family name is known only to a few. A professor of languages at Marseilles, he appeared in Paris a little after the fall of the Empire. The then representative of the Times in Paris, Mr. Laurence Oliphant, was rather a brilliantly philosophical commentator on news than a collector of it. The Chevalier Blowitz knew most things; what he did not know already he could unerringly find out. So began the connection of this most famous corre- spondent with the great newspaper. All his com- patriots throughout Europe rallied round Oliphant's assistant, who very soon became representative in chief of the newspaper. At first the intimate of the Due de Broglie, and the aristocratic Catholics of the Faubourg St. Germain, the Chevalier transferred himself to Gambetta, but broke with that statesman some time before his death. II a tous les vices Slav Catliolique decor^, were the words in which the French tribune rather unkindly summed up the cosmopolitan journalist after the rupture. The pretensions of the writer to consort on equal terms as one of the high contracting parties with the Minister may have offended the latter, but were not unjustified by facts, as the sequel both of M. Blowitz and of the Times has pretty conclusively shown. Very different from the Paris correspondent, who, whether on the Boulevards, or taking the waters at 204 PRI^TIN'G HOUSE SQUARE the Treport, literally as well as metaphorically, cannot be denied a place among the greatest forces of the European press, is the man who in Printing House Square itself regulates the relations of the journal to whatever happens beyond the four seas. Sir Mackenzie Wallace, who has the weight, inseparable from con- summate knowledge, in overlooking the foreign policy of the Times, concentrates in himself many educating influences unknown in the English journalism of fifty years ago. Men of this type have always given profes- sors to German universities, as at one time it seemed likely that Sir Mackenzie might himself develop. Then came the eventful sojourn in Russia, which produced in two volumes a work that has set a fashion in literature, and quite recently has set Mr. J. E. C. Bodley on executing a like labour for France. Apart from his immense and accurate knowledge, the chief feature of Sir Mackenzie Wallace is a pervading con- sciousness of responsibility. In that, though in nothing else, he resembles the late Abraham Hayward, whose opinion on affairs of State was valued equally by Delane and Palmerston not only because of the shrewdness of the man who gave it, but because, before delivering himself, Hayward mentally identified himself with a statesman in office ; he thus realized, ere his lips were open, the results which might follow were he in a position to translate 205 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD his views into practical action.^ The day is probably distant when the supreme editor of the Times will cease to be a man educated according to the con- ventional English methods, school and university. The new elements of culture imported by the very capable man now mentioned are therefore of the greater value to his administration ; they certainly claim a front place among the personal forces of the period. ^ Since his death Abraham Hayward has not wanted detractors among those who once waited on his words. What is here said about his responsibility is written exactly as Hayward himself told it to the writer. 206 BISHOP AND HISTOEIAN: THE RT. REV. DR. C. W. STUBBS A BISHOP this, as his dress says; a figure of portly build, below rather than above the middle height ; a grand head, thick eyebrows overhanging piercing but humorous eyes ; these, properly understood, reveal the character of the man. Heavy as the figure may seem, the gait is quick, even jaunty; that agility with- out suggests the intellectual swiftness within. In readiness and aptness of repartee a Wilberforce, but without a Wilberforce's suavity; the jococity rather that of the broadsword than the rapier. If a prelate could be guilty of rudeness, that failing might by his censors be imputed to this prelate in particular. " Excuse me, my Lord, for leaving so early." " Oh, yes ! we shall be more select." This fragment of casual conversation at a diocesan meeting between bishop and one of his clergy shows Dr. Stubbs not to sacrifice conversational truthfulness to grace. With something of the manner contracted by 207 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD school-masters, though he has never been one, Dr. Stubbs is intolerant of pretentiousness not more in a junior curate than in the most richly beneficed of his oldest clergy. His big mind is as tenacious of small things, of personal details, appearances, family relation- ships, and so forth, as the proverbial memory of our reigning House. Nor in ready command of minute precedents in Church or State does he fall short of a Mansel or a Macaulay. His very accomplished friend and colleague. Archdeacon Pott, might from personal experience illustrate this quality by tales of the way in which in a coterie of prelates, each one having delivered himself on the subject under discussion, Bishop Stubbs not yet having opened his mouth, now breaks silence with the crushing utterance : " You are all wrong." A Jowett himself could not have clenched the matter with a more annihilating remark. Diocesan Boards and other incidents of episcopal routine are not to his taste. Hence the fussy cleric of ordinary calibre says, " Oh yes, a great scholar ; but not a bishop of my sort." All, however, toadies and depreciators alike, are impressed by the intel- lectual colossus. At heart, too, he is, as none who know him can doubt, full of the kindness and the courtesy of the Christian gentleman. But he has trodden the uphill path of an opposed career from his earliest youth. The hard collision of narrow means 208 BISHOP STUBBS with a wealthier world does not always soften or sweeten the nature, still less polish the exterior surface. As a proof of his native kindliness may be mentioned the letter he wrote not long since to one of his clergy appointing him a rural dean ; this was so feelingly phrased as in each word to convince its recipient that the Bishop had no aim but to seem not the giver of a distinction, but the asker of a favour. Representing the historic knowledge of the Bench and of the Church, he incorporates in his writings the authentic knowledge of English History belonging to his period. Every sentence of a Froude, many sentences of a Lecky tingle with artistic feeling, and show the variety of the prose music which literary genius can draw forth from the English language. Not the picturesque but the encyclopaedic is the per- vading character of the Bishop of Oxford's historical writings. The Constitutional History of England and The Select Charters have done more than any other two works to impress their character upon the course of reading for the Modern History Schools at Oxford. Few students are likely to master all of the Bishop's works. As much of their contents as an ordinary mind can assimilate is admittedly indispensable to a fair learning of English History to-day. To say this is not to disparage the flowing and varied, as well as accurate, often epigrammatic narrative of a Lecky, or 209 p PERSONAL FORGES OF THE PERIOD the more special researches of a Gardiner. Dr. Stubbs is at home in all English History down to the Tudor period. From this knowledge he had written of it very much, as Mr. Gardiner knows, and has written of the Stuart times. Neither has left much behind him for others to do, though of necessity the field of the Bishop is very considerably the wider. Besides the works already named. The History of the Charters, there are editions of old chroniclers. Such are Roger Hoveden, Benedictus Abbas, Walter of Coventry, and others in the Ross series. Each of these treatises has been furnished by the Bishop with prefaces, of the highest value of course, but also in a tone of more popular interest than some of his other writings. Then there are the republished Oxford Lectures ; these are not difficult reading ; by them the author is probably best known to the general public. For the History and Charters are both beyond the person who shrinks from severe labour ; the Rolls prefaces, though less stiff, are not available for the private study of every citizen. Those who have no time for such exertions, if they possess any literary sense, may easily satisfy themselves by careful inspection of the print- ing rather than perusal of the contents of the books that Bishop Stubbs is not less remarkable for the logical clearness of his literary arrangement than for the massiveness of his knowledge. 210 BISHOP STUBBS The most convincing proof to his countrymen of the serviceableness of a Bishop Stubbs to his country and his Church was the way in which it proved to be necessary to call in his services on the matter of the Lincoln judgment. Than at the close of the nineteenth century, the national Church never knew a school of bishops of gifts or accomplishments more solid, more useful, and more various. The Apostolic Bishop, of whom Selwyn was the best known type, the combined embodiment of physical activity, pulpit vigour, pastoral usefulness, still exists in our colonies ; he is not unknown at home. Bishop Kennion, of Bath and Wells, is as much at home in the saddle of his bicycle as was ever Selwyn in that of his horse. Another prelate whose duty lies within the Metropolitan radius, lately thrown out in his arrangements by the unpunctuality of suburban trains, spied a costermonger's cart in the near distance, hailed it, boarded it, apron, gaiters and all ; he so arrived at the confirmation service where he was due. If the Archbishop of York be not great as a classical scholar, his proficiency with Sanskrit has been acknowledged by Mr. Max Mliller. Dr. Temple, as Archbishop of Canterbury, shows in their mellowness the qualities which Rugby and London long ago knew. At Fulham, Dr. Temple's successor, Bishop Creighton, in his own department fills a place as historian com- 211 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD parable with that of Bishop Stubbs, while Dr. Creighton is as yet only on the threshold of his episcopal career. Yet not less in his person than in his writings, the individuality of Bishop Stubbs is distinct and un- rivalled. Some years ago one who is well able to com- pare him with others of his order, said he had never met a divine whom, after penetrating beneath the outer crust of manner, one was more instinctively dis- posed to speak of as " old boy." These are the qualities which, not less than his matchless mastery of Church and universal history, indicate the Bishop of Oxford of 1898 as of the material out of which successors to Augustine at Canterbury are made. But the way to the Primacy, as the cases of a Temple and a Tait show, seems to lie through London not less surely than through Rugby. Lord Randolph Churchill's former tutor at Merton, to whom his pupil never forgot his indebtedness, has long since proved his power of diocesan organization ; he is in 1898 scarcely at the threshold of a remarkably vigorous middle age ; he has a presence picturesquely suited for the chair of which the comely, not less than accomplished, Dr. Benson was an ideal occupant. As historian he can be mentioned with Dr. Stubbs; as Primate he may arrive before him. 212 CANON GORE AND THE LUX MUNDl SCHOOL Take now a contrast to the substantial presence, easy and casual carriage of Bishop Stubbs. Yet this is another Oxford teacher who, though in 1898 a man well under fifty, is at Oxford and in London foremost among the personal forces of his generation. Canon Charles Gore, born in 1853, on his father's side comes from the stock of the Earls of Arran ; his mother was the Countess of Kerry, the widow of the eldest son of the great Lord Lansdowne, who as Lord Henry Petty served under Lord John Russell. In stature the difference between the chief of the Lux Mundi school and the Episcopal historian is not great; as to figure, instead of the robust, slightly rotund presence of the Prelate, the form of the Canon is almost attenuated ; sometimes one might fancy the figure encased in the black frock-coat, high waistcoat, 213 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD surmounted with the clerical collar cut like a jam-pot, contained nothing but soul. Exchange the complacent expression of the Bishop for a look of indifferent health and general painedness suggestive of Mr, Talbot, the first Warden of Keble College; surmount this presence with pointed features, fringed with a reddish-yellow beard, the portrait of this notable Churchman is tolerably complete. Canon Gore's school and college career were distinguished. At Harrow under Dr. Butler, in the house of Mr. A. G. Watson, he was three years in the Sixth Form, carried off most of the prizes for Latin and Greek scholarship. He left Harrow with a school scholar- ship ; he had in the previous autumn won the Balliol. In that examination he greatly impressed Mr. Jowett, Mr. H. J. Smith, and all the examiners with his essay on "Patriotism"; his remarks on the set theme had been supplemented by him of his own accord with some highly original sentences on Cosmopolitanism — a subject less than the other in the schoolboy or undergraduate line. The idea which he had proposed to himself at school, and up to which he acted, was that of completeness ; " except loaf, Gore does every- thing" was the verdict of the place on him. The ordinary games he played with diligence rather than with brilliance; was a chief figure in the school debating society, getting up every subject with elaborate pains 214 CANON GORE in every aspect and always taking the extreme Radical side. With the same thoroughness he edited the school journal ; he might have written every word of it ; could on an emergency have helped to set it up in type. But as happens with every boy who achieves dis- tinction in after life, Charles Gore's main employment at school was the regular school work. He was a born student. It came naturally to him, as even in these enlightened days it does but to few, to regard the Greek and Latin classics not as task work, but as literature. More than once he was known for pleasure to read through a Greek play without getting up from the table. The nooks and crannies of his time were filled up with voluntary studies. Thorough in his industry, he was of exemplary conscientiousness — a boy to whom a breach of the most trivial school rule seemed scarcely less of a moral enormity than a sin against the Decalogue. Even in these early years his religious opinions were formed. He had been brought up in the traditional High Church School ; he had himself an attachment to Ritualism, He never doubted that Holy Orders must be his profession. Oxford was morally and intellectually an extension of Harrow. On the Isis as at the School on the Hill fervently and consistently religious, laboriously diligent, he practised every form 215 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of self-denial and asceticism, less seemingly as a mode of discipline than as the practical expression of convictions and instincts. Intellectually he drifted away from pure scholarship after he had taken his first in Moderations. In spite of theological disagreement, Mr. Jowett's mind and character acquired a great influence over him ; he was also, like most clever young men of his day, a good deal affected by Mr. T. H. Green. After gain- ing a first-class in the final classical schools and a Fellowship at Trinity, he was at once ordained. But his bent was tutorial rather than parochial. Thus he became successively Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon, head of Pusey House, and a great power among the under- graduates. Readers of Lux Mundi know that what distinguished him from others educated on the same lines as himself was his attempt to reconcile free thought with authority, to lead young men in trouble about their souls to a conviction of the reasonableness of Christianity, and of the Sacramental view of Christianity in particular. Since the days of Pusey no don was more often con- ulted by perplexed undergraduates. Together with H. S. Holland, E. S. Talbot, and a few more of the younger tutors, he became the centre of that new school of thought whose object it is to combine the utmost freedom of literary criticism with the Old 216 CANON- GORE Testament with rigid orthodoxy on the doctrine of the Incarnation and all its derivative truths or dogmas. These doctrines firmly grasped as historical facts, the critics might do as they liked with the text. Mr. Gore's own essay, in the book on Inspiration, seemed, even to some of his teachers, a rather desperate attempt to prove the consistency of destructive analysis with religious authority. The feature in the book which chiefly excited anger and had much to do with the early death of Canon Liddon was Mr. Gore's con- tention that Our Lord had quoted as David's a psalm which David never wrote ; had even founded an argu- ment on the fallacy of the Davidic authorship. To get rid of that difficulty the Canon and his friends invented or manipulated for their own purpose the doctrine of the Kenosis. The probability seems to be that, as Mr. Jowett before him had sometimes done, Mr. Gore went further than he really saw. He never indeed admitted him- self to be wrong. But his Bampton Lectures delivered in 1891 seemed to have something of the character of a recantation. The subject was the Incarnation. The discourses establish beyond doubt his soundness on the Divinity of Christ. At Oxford Mr. Gore's supremacy ceased on his removal to Westminster, when Lord Rosebery made him a Canon; for at the University residence is the 217 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD first condition of influence with the young. His work is carried on on the Thames as effectively as on the Isis. At his special sermons, e. g. those on Good Friday during the last three years, there has been barely standing room. His pulpit manner is not that of eloquence, but of extreme fluency; of a command of language and argument so ready as to require scarcely the assistance of a single note. His voice is a baritone, very clear; but the articulation rather defective. Like other young Oxford men, he appre- ciates the strength and vivacity imparted to the Oxford prose masters, Goldwin Smith, Jowett and Froude, by the blending of the vernacular with the classic. Canon Gore, therefore, carries his love of the colloquial to a point that is neither eloquent nor graceful, and scarcely correct. Thus in his sermons one often hears him speak of being " out of it," " down on " a person. Perhaps the explanation of such ex- pressions may be found less in the studied and musical simplicity of a Jowett than in the effect notably upon the high school Anglicans of the pulpit methods of C. H. Spurgeon. That point will incidentally be considered in a later chapter. 218 PERSONAL FORCES OE NONCONFORMITY In the Church of England the High Anglicans, as the case of Canon Gore shows, have adopted more of the vernacular simplicity of sensational Nonconformist preaching. On the other hand, as Mr. Gladstone was the first to point out,^ a school of popular divinity has arisen common to Churchmen and Dissenters. If there be a new rajpprochement between the High Churchmanship of Lux Mundi and the Broad School, Anglican Evangelicals tend to ally themselves with Protestant Nonconformists. His years, his experience, his power alike on platform and with pen, give Bishop Ryle of Liverpool a foremost place among evangelical leaders. Dr. Lefroy, who suc- ceeded Dean Goulburn at Norwich, impresses all who know him as physically to a notable degree full of nervous power. His sennons are those of one who has distinct ideas, and who thinks as he speaks. Lately ^ Gleanings, V., p. 10. 219 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD he has shown great power and energy in the work of ecclesiastical economics ; that is, in the construction of a statesmanlike scheme for increasing the incomes of the poorer clergy, clerical pensions, and other such matters. Dr. Ellicott, a great Alpineer, has been styled Bishop of Gloucester and of the Aletsch Glacier. Dr. Lefroy in like manner blows off steam by doing peaks and passes. He might fairly be called Dean of Norwich and of Riffel Alp. Every one knows the Riffel Church near the hotel. That church Dean Lefroy was mainly instrumental in building. Than him Evangelicalism has no more militant member ; his dominating personal trait is a wiriness which proclaims a man who would not shrink in the face of opposition, might even challenge controversy rather than be without an argument. Of this school, as most Englishmen know it to-day, if Bishop Ryle be the head, Mr. Moule is the scholar, expositor, theologian, and poet. Mr. Webb Peploe, of South Kensington fame, is powerful as popular preacher and speaker. All these men, among many personal differences, agree in their main tenet, the distinctively Evangelical conception of Christianity. That is to say, all appear to emphasize the Atonement, man's acceptance through the merits of a Redeemer, by the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart — and this as conditioned, not primarily by sacraments and absolu- tions, but by the individual's faith, however much 220 PERSONAL FORCES OF NONCONFORMITY ordinances as helps are maintained by contemporary Evangelicals as they were insisted on by Wesley. The foregoing is an unscientific definition of Evan- gelicalism which would not perhaps have been dissented from by the ablest and staunchest of Evangelical Nonconformists, the late R. W. Dale, the well-known Congregationalist clergyman of Birmingham. On his side, his position was not at all unlike that of the late Dean Arthur Stanley of Westminster. Both men were above sectarian prejudices and jealousies; both welcomed anything which promised to bring into closer com- munion Christians of all denominations outside the Roman discipline. Those who would judge the actively educational force of the more thoughtful and able dissenting ministers might be recommended to read such a book as the treatise by Dr. Bruce (Free Church, Glasgow) on The Providential Ordei' ; the value of this work is not controversial or even theological alone. There is no handier summary of the scientific equivalents for revealed religion from the pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer to Comte, Darwin or Huxley. Of Congregationalism, Dr. Fairbairn of Mansfield College, Oxford, is altogether the most eminent representative in theology, philosophy, and Scotch metaphysics. Lacking intellectual passion, he wants variety of manner and of voice. His sermons, delivered 221 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD wholly without notes, even when dealing with the most intricate subjects, are real tours de force. His diction and his arguments are like those of a man who thinks in antitheses. On a high level he starts. On that level throughout his discourse he keeps. The most notorious, the most various and complex of Congre- gationalists, as well perhaps as the greatest personal force among them, is probably Dr. Parker. As a fact two Parkers meet in a single individual. One is the rhetorical, the bombastic, the unreal, full of big words and little meaning, sometimes absolutely grotesque. The other is the real man, the genius that discovers the new in the old, that excels in pathos, irony, dramatic rhetorical power ; the master of scrip- tural illustration, the wonder and the despair of all ministers who hear him. Dr. Guinness Rogers represents Congregationalism in ecclesiastical and political controversy. Though his ministry has now lasted more than fifty years, his characteristics are as vivid as ever. There are still the rhetorical passion and the trenchant manner of old ; the voice is resonant, even in old age ; the thought may be familiar, but it is driven home by personal force of conviction. A contrast to Dr. Rogers among younger men, alike in neatness of person and of literary style, is Dr. Horton ; here is the Congregational preacher who in studied avoidance of rhetoric as well as in a com- 222 PERSONAL FORCES OF NONCONFORMITY bination of higher criticism and almost mystical piety most resembles Canon Gore in the Established Church. In him, as in Mr, R. J. Campbell, of Brighton, the Oxford culture shows itself in thoroughness of treat- ment, in severity of style, and, at least in the case of Mr. Campbell, in a studied contempt of the more cheap and popular ornaments of pulpit oratory. The Rev. F. B. Meyer, of rare spiritual power, influences his public more perhaps by his pen than his pulpit. Such men, as Mr. Arnold Thomas, a Cambridge graduate, at Bristol, reminds one, are limited neither to the capital nor to towns which, like Brighton, are almost part of London. The position in their own communions of the men now mentioned has its parallels in that of Dr. Clifford, a representative of the forward movement among the Baptists, and in that of Mr. Price Hughes among the Wesleyans. After Mr. Spurgeon, no individual made Noncon- formist Evangelicalism so living a thing outside Non- conformist limits as the late Dr. Dale, of Birmingham. What a Tait or Stanley was inside the Church of Eng- land that Dr. Dale was without it. With Anglicans the place of Arthur Stanley is still vacant ; with Noncon- formists the work of R. W. Dale is still going on. As tutor of Trinity Hall, his son, Mr. A. W. Dale, takes a leading part in College work as well as in University administration ; though both Universities are of course 223 PEE so NIL FORCES OF THE PERIOD absolutely open to Nonconformist undergraduates, Non- conformity as a part of the academic system is still a project rather than an achievement ; so that as the elder Dale did much to spiritualize the business men of the Midlands who sat under him, the younger carries on his father's work in traditionally the most liberal of our two national seats of learning. 224 AN ACADEMICAL GROUP Oxford has shared the fate of other centres of national activity and interest. Within little more than a year it has lost most of those commanding personalities who had passed from individuals into institutions. The most prominent and powerful men in the life of the place to-day are, however, a great deal more than respectable mediocrities. There is indeed no one so much en ra'pyort with a section of the governing class as Mr. Jowett, who was equally ready to counsel an undergraduate about his reading and a Governor-General of India about his policy ; whose advice, too, had been asked by most people in their time, had been occasionally followed with advantage. The successor of Jowett in the Mastership is already one among the most impressive, not the least picturesque, figures in the city. Tall, rather gaunt, with features spiritualized and ennobled by the power 225 Q PERSO^'-AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of a still developing intellect, Mr. Edward Caird reminds all, who know them both, of his more famous brother. Principal Caird, of Glasgow. It was the Prin- cipal's sermon on the occasion of his Lord Rectorial visit in 1873 which impressed Disraeli so power- fully. Mr. Edward Caird, too, was at Glasgow as Professor of Moral Philosophy when, on the death of Jowett, he was called to the headship of the College where he had been Jowett's pupil. Long before even Jowett's time, the fame and influence of Balliol were set on a foundation so deep and wide as to be independent of individuals or of djoiasties. Already, however, Mr. Caird's personal influence for good has made itself felt on the same scale as that of his forerunner ; it has embodied elements of authority and teaching that belong entirely to the present Master himself. The unanimous verdict of local and national experts is that Mr. Caird, five years ago known to them little more than by name, has proved himself a great and influential man of a fine type. The sermon of his brother, ex-Principal Caird, which so struck the Conservative statesman twenty-five years ago, was a searching and very original vindi- cation of a familiar theme — the services of philosophy rightly used as the handmaid of faith. In its treat- ment by the preacher there was little that was not now. 226 A^ ACADEMICAL GROUP What chiefly struck Disraeli seems to have been the condensed comprehensiveness and vigorous novelty of the sentences reviewing the tenets of Spinoza, Hegel, one or two more, and demonstrating after the manner of Paley in his Horce Paulince, their undesigned testimony to the truth of Revelation. Something of the same sort had been done by the younger brother, now in Balliol, in his treatises on Comte, Kant, Hegel, and his Gilford Lectures on the Evolution of Religion. It was part of the Scheme of Jowett to make his College a national capital, a point whereat there should always converge the best currents of academic and popular thought. It is easy to see what imprac- ticable difficulties a merely loyal but not absolutely wise perpetuation of the Jowett tradition would en- counter. To the 1898 Master of Balliol belongs the credit of carrying on all that was useful of Jowett's peculiar work, all that was desirable or possible, apart from Jowett's exceptional personality and the singular relations growing out of it, between the Master, the College on the one hand, and the world with its chief powers on the other. The two heads of Oxford houses belonging to the old order are Drs. Bellamy at St. John's and Sewell at New College. Both of these are fine specimens of the academic gentleman of mature years, whom every one must hope the place will never quite lose. 227 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Dr. Sewell bears a name as well known in letters as that of his relative, the Miss Sewell whose High Church novels, some fifty in number, were once classics in most of the clerical school-rooms or nurseries of England. Dr. Sewell's particular work was to prepare the way for Mr. Jowett's labours on Plato ; and long before the famous Master of Balliol had become a power to per- form a memorable part in promoting the Platonic revival on the Isis. Dr. Bellamy, at the College of Laud, followed very shortly after Dr. Wynter; than these — if Dean Liddell and Dr. Plumptre of Uni- versity are to be excepted — Victorian Oxford has not known two more conspicuously patrician College heads. The connecting link between the old school and the new in this category is supplied by Dr. Magrath, Provost of Queen's. Archbishop Thomson nationalized the resources of this wealthy foundation by securing the abolition of geographical restrictions in com- petition for College prizes. After he had done this, the time before his removal, first to the Bishopric of Gloucester, secondly to the Primacy of the North, was too short to enable him to crown the edifice of his work. Dr. Thomson's successor, Archdeacon Jackson, a perfect specimen of the Avell-bred kindly ecclesiastic, wanted neither dignity, ability nor loyalty to his work. It was reserved for his successor, Dr. Magrath, to take 228 AN- ACADEMICAL GROUP up Thomson's work at the point it had been laid down, and identifying with the national life himself and his college, in his double capacity of Provost and Vice- Chancellor, to raise the whole tone and greatly increase the usefulness of the society over which he still presides. Other points of contact between Oxford and English existence outside it are supplied of course by Dr. Paget, Liddell's successor as Dean of Christ Church, a man of presence not less distinguished, and simple dignity not less respect-compelling, than his famous father, the well-known surgeon who was surely in- tended by nature for a medical peer. The President of Magdalen, Dr. Herbert Warren, is a poet of wide repute. The head of Hertford, Dr. Boyd, is an artist of more than local fame. Mr. Pelham, Camden Pro- fessor of History, has influenced as many minds, and not less markedly, in another department, than Canon Gore ; while like the Canon Mr. Pelham is a reformer. The Provost of All Souls' follows the precedents of that select society by having made himself a name as a jurist. Professor By water is known throughout Europe not only as an accomplished Hellenist but as an incomparable Aristotelian scholar. Mr. J, L. Strachan Davidson, of Balliol, has done more than any one else to bring the Civil Service and Oxford together ; Mr. Sidgwick, though not originally an Oxford man, is a noticeable force of the period — illus- 229 PERSON-AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD trating in himself at once the cosmopolitan receptivity of the University to which he now belongs, and the most approved methods of modern teaching. He is not only a very able College lecturer but Reader in Greek. While patriotism would cause every public school man to identify the head of his own particular school with the greatest scholastic force of the period, it is not to the professional achievements, the noticeably wide sympathies and reforming zeal of Dr. Warre of Eton, of Dr. Welldon of Harrow, of Dr. Bell of Marl- borough, that one would go for a representative of that force in the profession of school-mastering which is distinctively typical of this part of our century. The successful school-master to-day is necessarily not so much a great scholar, nor even a man supplementing Arnold's force of character with Arnold's learning and sympathies, as a successful organizer. Such was the late Mr. Thring, of Uppingham. Such is the present Mr. Walker, of the rejuvenated and famous St. Paul's School, now removed from the City to a convenient suburb of London. The High Master of St. Paul's, to give him his historic title, dealing with a varied and difficult class of parents, has shown a remarkable tact in winning alike the confidence of themselves and their children. He has hit the happy mean be- tween exalting athletics over studies, and ignoring the 230 AN ACADEMICAL GROUP games of his boys in his desire to promote their work. This has been done at a transitional period of extreme difficulty in the existence of St. Paul's. Mr. Walker's manner of doing it has earned for him in a very special degree a front place among the pedagogic forces of his period. As regards teachers of exceptional personal influence Cambridge in 1898 seems even more deficient than Oxford. A Master of Trinity, whoever he may be, is, as Macaulay long ago perceived and said, ex officio a great power in his University and his country. The present professor of Greek at Cambridge, which he also represents in Parliament, Professor R. C. Jebb, is probably the greatest Greek scholar England now has; certainly he is one of the very few who, representing his country at the Bologna celebration some years since, could commemorate the occasion in a Pindaric ode so impregnated with the spirit and diction of his exemplar, that in days to come, when the New Zealander has arrived, when St. Stephen's and Trinity are both mouldering ruins, future critics lighting on this composition may discuss whether it be not a feather rescued on the Thames from the veritable plumage of the eagle of Thebes. Of a keen, nervous temperament, excelling in modern as well as ancient letters, Mr. Jebb is just the man to influence intel- ligent and susceptible youth. Times leader-writing 231 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD years ago nearly gained what his University has not yet lost, for Mr. Jebb is master of lucid and vigorous English. The active and far-reaching quality of his power is seen at the end of the century on the Ilissus as well as the Cam. For the British School of Studies at Athens would not exist but for the advocacy of his speech and pen. It would have had little popular support but for the humanizing influences of Professor J. P. Mahaffy outside as well as within the University. Nor among contemporary figures at Cambridge should that of Mr. Oscar Browning — the exterior of the tonsure united with the universally inquiring spirit of the liberal-minded historian — be omitted* Something of the impetus recently given to historical studies in Cambridge is due to the widely-read writings of this versatile and indefatigable student, who carries his fame and his studies with him on his Long Vacation tricycle tours anywhere between Pontricina and the Pyramids. But since the death of Dr. Hort and the removal of Dr. Westcott to Durham, no Cambridge personality diffuses itself as one of the very first calibre throughout the city once filled by a Butler and a Whewell. 232 THE "FACULTY" AS A SOCIAL FORCE A MAN equally noted in the society of the present and in the politics of the past, who has died while these pages are preparing for the press, Charles Pelham Villiers, once described to the present writer as a contrast between mole-hills and mountains the difference between the earlier and later years of a century he had known from the beginning. Our latter- day mediocrities are, he would say, so accomplished and active as to be taken for master spirits. The remark seems to hold good more or less of every department of professional effort. The popular and handy explanation is that of the law ordaining the ebb after the flow; for the reaction after the action. The substitution of petty kingdoms, among whom was distributed the power once exercised by a central empire, is the historic transformation known to every reader of Gibbon. With the social life of the people 233 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD this movement really finds its parallel in the healing art and those who practise it. Never were the doctors more of a social force among us than to-day. Never was their power so equally spread among a number of men, all of the first order of professional skill; none of them enjoying a position of ascendency so universal and unchallenged as was given by the consent of their colleagues to a Hunter, to a Lister, or more lately to a Holland, a Clark, a Gull. Disraeli administered many well-deserved snubs to followers of the foolish habit of conversational de- traction from the merits of public men. In this country, he would say, no man not of the first class in his line ever gets into a Cabinet, or ever becomes a leader in his profession, whatever it be. The latest President of the Royal College of Physicians is the son of an Anglo-Indian well known in his day ; he is himself one of the earliest investigators into those nervous maladies that are the special ailments of the age; having been born some twelve years before the Queen's accession, Dr. Wilks is of course considered by a younger race to belong to the past rather than the present. Not perhaps quite so well known as his pre- decessor, Sir Russell Reynolds, Wilks, like Rejmolds, is not to the public of to-day all which an Andrew Clark or a Gull was in his earlier epoch. Both Gull and Clark owed not perhaps their greatness but the vogue, 234 THE 'FACULTY' AS A SOCIAL FORCE which is so often a part of greatness, to the same accidental advantage, viz. the association of their names with that of an unusually illustrious patient. Always a man of powerful and trained intellect, equal to greatness in any lay sphere, even Sir William Gull had not crowned the professional edifice before the illness of the Prince of Wales in 1873. Had not the Heir-Apparent before Dr. Gull was called in been treated skilfully by the late Dr. Budd and other practitioners of the same calibre, the care and science even of Dr. Gull might have been in vain. By no one better than by those who had been his fellow-students, especially the late gifted and generous Morell Mac- kenzie, had the rare endowments of Andrew Clark been recognized before he became the physician in ordinary to a great statesman. But for that profes- sional connection, however, his less highly placed fellow-subjects might not have had the advantage of knowing his name as a household word. Even Dr. Wilks, before reaching the absolute head of his pro- fession, filled high places at Court ; he had been a physician in ordinary to the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, as well as an extraordinary one to Her Majesty. Later instances, in a perfectly honourable manner, show the Royal to be also the normal path to professional eminence. Sir William Broadbent is in 1898 the London man to vv'hom the local practitioner 235 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD naturally sends the more considerable of his sick. The illness of the Duke of Clarence may not have been essential to Dr. Broadbent; it could not be otherwise to him than a pedestal in his profession. Sir Douglas Powell has long had the praise of the trained hospital nurses of London, perhaps in such a matter judges as good as the modish critics of Mayfair. The ideas called up by, as pedantry might put it, the connotative power of Sir Douglas Powell's name might seem to the public of the newspapers inferior even now to that of a Clark or a Gull some years ago. Some experts hold the comparative absence of the physician of the day to be due to the effects on the mind of that specialism in study which dominates all professions. Others think the explanation to be the notable outburst of medical genius and research which marked earlier years of the present epoch; hence, by the law mentioned above, the comparative reign of mediocrity to-day. When this disparaging term is remembered to include such prac- titioners as a Stephen Mackenzie and Sansom, in addition to those just named, it might be thought that through all grades of the profession there have been such a levelling up, so wide and thorough a diffusion of professional excellence, that the rank and file of the profession to-day stand generally on the same eminence as the leaders of it did a few years ago. That is no doubt the truth. It is only within the 236 THE 'FACULTY' AS A SOCIAL FOnCE last two decades that the secrets of disease, withheld through centuries, have been discovered. Hence the special suitableness of the epithet transitional as applied to the position of the healing profession to-day. The larger and the newer knowledge of the human frame and its ailments has been followed by a complete change in medical teaching. The lay public might identify with the medical forces of the period any or all of the growing group of baronets whose names cluster round illustrious invalids. These, however, are daily acquiring new knowledge from obscure coadjutors plodding in the laboratories. To those workers the world will owe the mitigation of disease in the future. Is ethics a progressive science ? was once a stock problem in the final schools at Oxford. The same question has lately been propounded and answered by many considerable writers on medicine. But the truth seems to be that in medicine itself no very startling achievement is, during 1898, in progress. The personal forces of the healing arts or sciences are the surgeons ; increasingly the knife and the lancet encroach on the domain of medicine. Thus the strides lately made in the surgery of the abdomen surpass in importance any of the victories of the Pharmacopoeia. Nothing therefore was more proper than that the first medical peer should be a surgeon, the Lord Lister who by his antiseptic discoveries 237 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD rendered possible and safe operations which before then were not only impracticable but unthinkable. Into the healing heritage thus opened to them many surgeons to be ranked among the forces of the period have entered. In proof of this one need only mention the names of F. Treves and Henry Morris. Before the twentieth century is very old the running may be once more taken up by the doctors. The members of that craft now coming forward are pro- bably better trained than any of their predecessors ; they are not likely to yield to earlier surgeons in actual achievement. With kind and clever Sir Richard Quain, who has died while these pages are being pre- pared for the press, there has departed the last survivor of an old school of practitioners. These owed their success not less to insight into human nature than to training in the school or to " the books." In his keen power of human sympathy, and in that forgetfulness of self which is the secret of influence over others, Quain resembled another of his countrymen, also a doctor and a man of the world, Dr. Quin, well known in the society of the sixties. He, like Quain, healed patients quite as much by his friendly counsel as by his pro- fessional prescriptions. The growing proficiency of the doctor of the period in these extra-professional qualifi- cations tends increasingly to make him a social force of the period. 238 THE 'FACULTY' AS A SOCIAL FORCE One has often been told of the press having taken the place of the jDriest. Perhaps the physician might advance claims to be considered in that line of suc- cession. He at any rate it is to-day who makes alike the fortune of places ; perhaps at critical points in the career of individuals too. That some of the older health resorts of Great Britain, such as Bath, are renewing their old prosperity is due to the fact of the faculty combining to recognize other qualities than those which depress in its climate, or to discover even new vii'tues in its waters. On the other hand, more than one South of England seaside resort has entered on its decadence because the same oracles have de- clared its winter breezes to be treacherous, or the true health-giving quality to be wanting, as at Bourne- mouth, to its " tar-water." No class of men has helped more young beginners in life on their way than those physicians of whom the first Sir Henry Holland will always be remembered as representative and chief. No professional person of any calibre is still a more formidable enemy to any person at any period of his life than Sir Henry Holland's successors. The ability of solicitor, barrister. Civil servant, or Parliament man may be of the highest kind, but the professional worker has an illness, which after it has passed away leaves long weakness of body behind, or when the great medicine men predicted he would be in his 239 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD grave, the invalid professionally doomed is getting back to his chambers and riding in the Park, yet he will not find it any easy matter to resume his position in life unless he can first make his peace with the doctors for disappointing their calculations ; for having had the audacity to recover when by all the laws of Galen, Hippocrates, and the whole College of Physi- cians, he ought to have been in his decrepitude or his sepulchre ; and unless from their grudging hands a clean bill of health is wrung, his convalescence will not benefit the breadwinner of his family much. 240 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK " I HAVE heard of a philosopher who trained a wasp, but never of a young lady who trained butterflies." Such is one of the most vivid of the not very numerous personal touches to be met with in Bulvver Lytton's latest novels. It occurs in Kenelm Chillingly. The commentary of fact needed to make the allusion of the novelist generally intelligible was not given to the world till many years after the creator of Kenelm Chillingly had passed away. No handier synopsis of the moulding influences of the new age can be furnished than by the four volumes of diary Notes, wherein Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has said much that is pleasant and true about his friends and their work, but has only suggested the considerable part played by himself in promoting the intellectual culture of his generation. As is told in the second volume of the first series of the diary Notes, it was in the late summer of 1872, and in pelting rain, on the confines of France 241 R PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD and Spain, in the heart of Valle de Lys, that Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff himself found the sweet- scented Lunaria Bediviva, that his companion, Miss Bruce, detected a campanula, hitherto unknown to foreign botanists ; this provoked from the late Henry J. Smith, of Oxford fame, the exclamation — " Find a new campanula ! I should as soon expect to find a new bear." Continues the diarist: These discoveries were thrown into the shade by Lubbock, who on this occasion captured the celebrated wasp ; none other than that immortalized by Lytton. This was the insect which, having solaced the homeward journey of the party, spent the summer as the centre of a circle of admiring friends at High Elms, and after an exceptionally long life, was not only buried in the British Museum, but embalmed in English literature. A few years later than this, when York House, Twickenham, had passed from the hands of the Orleanists into those of the Grant Duffs, at each week's end in fair weather, no figure was looked out for more eagerly than that of a slightly but strongly built man with square muscular shoulders, who, accompanied mostly by a then little girl, his daughter, seldom failed, at a swinging pace, with elastic step to walk up the gravel drive a few minutes after the dinner train had landed him at the neighbouring station. This was the friend of the family, the friend 242 SIR JOny LUBBOCK of all who know him, the flower of Eton courtesy and breeding, as well as a true force and teacher of his age, the banker baronet, John Lubbock. The names of the two men should be bracketed together. Mere politics apart, the service rendered by them to their epoch has been the same. Not seldom did the talk of the little company go back to the house-parties of men of science and thought entertained by Falkland at his house at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, even in the very midst of the throes of revolution and the tumult of war. Intellectually the most notable feature of the Caroline period was the scientific movement which founded the Royal Society, as representatives of which, Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood ; Radcliffe's successors increased the knowledge of electricity; the astronomers who in England in- tei-preted the system of Copernicus, discussed the third law of Kepler. If to have assisted at these gatherings seemed to Falkland's contemporaries in itself a little course of learning, the Saturday to Monday Grant Duff and Lubbock meetings had in their way not less of educational use for those capable of profiting by them. The function of a Grant DufF has been not unlike that of a Matthew Arnold, his friend. The unreflecting Philistinism of the great middle class of his countrymen was alternately lashed or lamented, with scorn or pathos, by Arnold. 243 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The failure of our Parliament men and governing officials to reach the core of politics abroad ; the ignorance arising partly from insular prejudice, partly from intellectual sluggishness, on the true issue of events beyond the four seas, — these are the national deficiencies which Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has satirized, but which, having conscientiously collected it, he has given his countrymen the material to supply. Thoroughly trained at Oxford in a college mere membership of which is a distinction, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff had scarcely returned to England from his Madras Government when he was mentioned by residents on the Isis as a possible successor to his friend Jowett in the Mastership of Balliol. But his most enduring work is outside the limit of Oxford traditions, as well as independent of the political life where he achieved Ministerial rank. His addresses on educational subjects at Clifton, where his sons were educated, in their day attracted almost as much notice as his addresses at Elgin — which sent him to Parliament. When Sir John Lubbock and Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff first entered the House of Commons the place was wrapped in the darkness of what the fourteenth Lord Derby called the pre-scientific period. Its intellectual atmosphere, if that medium may be allowed to it, was charged -with traditions of a literature and rhetoric of 244 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK the Latin and Greek classics. Hitherto, the best parliamentary genius had been brought up in the school of Canning. The accepted references to books were to familiar passages in the least recondite plays of Shakespeare, to the best known extracts of the old Eton handbooks, the Scriptorcs Grmci and Romani, or for that matter to the Eton Syntax itself. So far as Lord John Russell or Lord Palmerston showed any intellectual interest outside politics, they anticipated the Lord Salisbury, the Lord Randolph Churchill, and the Charles Stewart Parnell (whose pet pursuit was chemistry) of a later day in inclining to physical science. But spite of his Cambridge training and his preparation for it by a Scotch philosopher. Lord Palmerston had no longing for admission into the arcana of the visible universe. This may be surmised from the fact that once, when in a drawing-room Wheatstone was explaining to Palmerston some new electrical discoveries, the unregenerate old statesman cut the discourse short with his usual exclamation — " God bless my soul ; you don't say so ! " adding — " I must really get you to explain this to the Lord Chancellor." So, leaving Lord Westbury to be button- holed by the professor, the national favourite bounded off like a boy from the class-room. The Queen, indeed, had declared herself on the side of science by writing her name in the member-book of 245 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the Royal Societ}^ directly after her accession. But the scientific tastes of the Prince Consort had not then leavened the public mind. The British Association meetings, older by six years than the Victorian age, had not made the Society itself the power which it has since become. Political people, whose education had ceased on entering the upper school at a national seat of learning, talked of ologies and isms as things to be avoided, and classed all inquiries into the material of the planet they inhabited or the conditions under which they existed, with the evil smells of the chemist's laboratory ; with the zinc wire, liquid manure and other such inventions that the friend of Canning, the Aristophanic Hookham Frere, a generation or two earlier, had sneered at as summing up the new culture which was shortly to replace the old. That the prejudice now described has become an anachronism is partly due to the influence and example of the tv/o friends now named. Science of some kind as a pastime is hereditary with the Lubbocks, not less than banking as a profession, or as in the Lubbock family Eton itself. This is saying a good deal. Within human memory there has never yet been an Eton without a Lubbock, usually one having a seat in the Thetis or the Monarch. Sent on leaving school into the family business house in Lombard Street, allied as he grew in years or in the 246 Sm JOHN LUBBOCK circle of intelligent interests with all that is most typically new in nineteenth-century culture, member for, Chancellor of, a university whose idea would have been to some Etonians an abomination, Sir John Lubbock has never lost the lounging grace of manner which is peculiar to the Sixth-Form Eton boy. The youthfulness of his figure, the freshness of his enthusi- asms, cause him perhaps to feel as well as still to look that part. If the scientific impulse with him has been ancestral, something of its cultivation and satisfaction must be set down to environment. That particuFar comer of Kent where he lives is an ideal paradise for the naturalist. Nowhere does the soil produce more delicate creeper plants. Nowhere do rarer, daintier insects, or if familiar of more imposing proportions, settle upon the leaves or flit against the lamp-lit windows. Owen and Darwin were only two of the neighbours within an easy call of High Elms, or of the once frequent visitors at that house. Beneath that pleasant roof rehearsals for British Association meetings have been informally held all the year round. Mr. Herbert Spencer's health, even when it has prevented his paying many visits, has seldom kept him away from High Elms, Hither by a natural impulse all foreign men of science visiting England have come. The house inside has become almost as much a museum of manufactured curiosities as its grounds 247 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD are the haunt of the organic rarities of nature. Here is, or was, a collection of scientific firearms of all degrees of skill or clumsiness ; not omitting a pair of eighteenth-century pistols humorously declared by one of the ladies of the family to have been mentioned in Thackeray's Vanity Fair — " same as which I shot Captain Marker." Though Sir John Lubbock's climax of triumphant discovery was the wasp mentioned above, that is not the insect which first engaged his observations. Long before his essays and addresses had proclaimed him the champion of wasps, he had been the pos- sessor and student of a community of particularly fine ants. The smoking-room at High Elms is also the habitat of these small creatures. Under a glass cover, the keen-eyed watcher notes a panorama of industrial processes recalling nothing so much as the description of the doings of bees in the fourth book of the Georgics. Nor does it need their owner's knowledge to understand his opinion that the ant, though a smaller and less obtrusive object than the wasp, remains the more interesting study of the two. The researches suggested by the ant-chamber are admitted by experts to have been original as well as to be of abiding value. It is not, indeed, as an original researcher that this accomplished and amiable man of science would classify himself It is not, 248 SIE JOHN LUBBOCK therefore, as such that a place is given to him in these pages. That which makes John Lubbock one among the personal forces of his period is his undoubted performance of a part resembling in physicism that which has been played by France in the intellectual history of the world. There are no modes or dis- coveries of Teutonic, or more eastward, speculation which have not converged upon the banks of the Seine. Hence they have spread to Anglo-Saxon lands ; from these to beyond the Atlantic and through- out the New World. In the same way that France has acted as the interpreter of Europe to the rest of mankind ; by his writings, by his oral addresses, especially by his intelligent indexing of European literature for the guidance of British readers of all ages and all classes, Sir John Lubbock has in very truth performed for his generation those processes of philosophic midwifery and popular interpretation which Socrates considered himself to differ from all who had gone before him in fulfilling. The work of creative philosophy and scientific research that is the peculiar mark of the middle and closing century would have been accomplished perhaps if Sir John Lubbock had never been a weekly visitor at York House, Twicken- ham, or the host of savants of all countries at High Elms. Without him these labours would have been popularized more slowly, and have excited much less 249 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD of widely diffused interest than for the encouragement of the researchers themselves fortunately has been the case. The use of the word science as an equivalent for physicism alone has been justly censured. Equally inaccurate is it to restrict the term philosophy to the region of immaterial inquiry. As Bulwer Lytton long ago showed himself to be aware in the passage quoted above, Sir John Lubbock, by the entire cast of his mind, habit of his thought, and tenor of his writing or his speech, has shown that a physicist may be as true a philosopher as a metaphysician. 250 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES Wealth, and the power given by wealth, form only- one of the grounds of complaint against the growth in England of the foreign element for which the name of Rothschild is a synonym. The peculiar quality of the Jew brain wins out of London the same victories in other departments that it achieves in the City. The successes of a Mr. Margoliouth, of New College at Oxford, in the schools have been not less unconscion- able in their way than those of a Rothschild in the Mart. In commerce the prominence of the Jew stock among colonial capitalists has identified to some extent with the Jews, even our Anglo-Saxon fellow- subjects who, coming from the Colonies, fill collectively something of the place of the late Sir Samuel Wilson. The Robinsons and Taylors represent the wealth obtained from South Africa, the Whitaker Wrights and the Bottomleys represent the wealth of West Australia. 251 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The operations of all these gentlemen have neces- sarily brought them into friendly relations with those who are known to-day as the cosmopolitan race. In the case of America, the competition on the soil of the old country between Britisher and Yankee is literary and intellectual as well as social and fashionable. That movement was begun by Mr. G. W. Smalley, long the European correspondent of the Neiv York Tribune, to-day in New York the correspondent of the London Times. Mr. Marion Crawford and Mr. Henry James are only two American litterateurs whose home is London, and who have quickened the business of the novel market. Colonial fiction has long held its own against British or American. Even so the colonial millionaire is now established among us as the rival of the millionaire from Chicago or New York. For His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, is as powerful in its realism as, and rather more terrible in its details than, the Never too Late to Mend of our own Charles Reade. But the writer of fiction from beyond the four seas who probably has the greatest vogue at home is, as one might have expected, a colonial of Semitic extraction. By residence Mr. B. L. Farjeon is not less of a Londoner than Lord de Rothschild ; he is also by historic descent not less closely connected with the all-conquering East. This is a career typical of the colonial writer who succeeds ; it was begun as a 252 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES journalist in New Zealand ; by the newspaper work there was developed an exceptional power in the description of child life. Henry Kingsley is of course as purely Anglo-Saxon in stock and sentiment as his brother who wrote Weshoard Ho ! He was, also, an Australian resident ; Geoffrey Hamlyn and Ravcnshoe are full of the local colour of the Antipodes. They describe respectively with truth as well as power the two great visitations of nature that most vex the land of the Southern Cross, flood and famine. In the same category as Farjeon one must place the Australian stories of E. W. Hornung. But the book most racy of the Australian soil that has of late interested the readers of the two hemispheres is by a man of exactly the same colonial stock as Farjeon. Sir Julius Vogel might be called the Disraeli of Antipodean letters and politics ; his Anno Domini WOO is to him and his public what Goningsby was to Disraeli and those who read it fifty years ago. The date of the introductory prologue is some time in the twentieth century ; how a certain Claude Sonsius helps on a world-wide revolution ; the incidents in this extraordinary movement — these are conceived in the same spirit of daring and tropical fancy in which Disraeli depicted the adventures of Ixion in Heaven, or in which the same eminent hand drew the dreams of the Syrian Fakredeen. To begin with, in A.D. 2000 253 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the King of England and Emperor of India is settled in a palace on the banks of that Yarra River which was heard of so often in the Tichborne trial. If any hard-and-fast scheme of Imperial Federation be ever accomplished, Sir Julius Vogel will be hailed its prophet, even as a naturalized Hebrew still more illustrious first expounded in his novels and speeches the gospel of the new Conservatism, Too young to have even so much of a past as America, Australia, thanks largely as one cannot doubt to the rarefying influences of Hebrew genius, has produced a serious school of indigenous prose writers far more exclusively typical of their country than anything which has yet seen light on the other side of the Atlantic ; if further proof of that were needed, it would be found in the purely Australian stories of Mrs. Patchett Martin, a prose Laureate of the Australian bush, and of Mrs. Campbell Praed. Each of these is the avowed student of George Meredith. The foremost of English novel- ists now living is as thoroughly the product of his time and of his British home as the writers already mentioned show the reflection of their own natural environments. A strikingly handsome intellectual head of the leonine sort, as painted by Watts. This is all that most Englishmen know concerning the personality of the novelist whom not even those who fail to appreciate 254 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES his works will deny to be among the foremost forces of his period. Some indeed have seen a powerful form walking at a swinging pace over the undulating downs where the counties of Hampshire and Surrey meet. Some again, mostly those professionally interested in letters, have seen the same presence in the reading or dining-room of a well-known Covent Garden club, or have perhaps had business interviews with him in an upper room of a Covent Garden publishing house. Resembling Robert Browning in his turn for the hard problems of life as the subjects of his pen ; not unlike that master, too, in some habits of diction, George Meredith, as regards his social tastes and personal habits, is less in sympathy with Browning than with Tennyson. That same region which changes suddenly from city suburb to solitary hill or deserted woodland loved by Tennyson, has been chosen by Meredith for his home and his workshop. Dickens, even when at Gadshill, never ceased to be a familiar figure in the Strand. To the day of his death he was as well known by every class of Londoner as had been Lord Palmerston himself Much the same place in his profession, not at all the same place in the personal knowledge of him, that Dickens once held, is filled by Meredith to-day. In all other respects save those now mentioned, the parallel between Browning and Meredith is scarcely less close than that between 255 PERSONAL FORCES OF TEE PERIOD their kind of genius. Browning, a Londoner by birth, was probably never more happy than when in the thick of London society. Meredith, a native of Hamp- shire, shuns all those distractions of life in which the poet so intensely delighted. But for the intellectual dignity of his air and manner Browning might have been mistaken for a mature loetit maitre of Mayfair. A country gentleman of pure Saxon breed, but of presum- ably artistic tastes — whence the shaggy exterior — this is what an observing stranger would at once see in Meredith. In both cases fame came after long waiting ; in both, too, unexpectedly by the men themselves, fame has been followed by popularity. Browning lived long enough to see his writings in the hands of passengers by omnibus or train ; to know that he was read not less by City clerks than by West End young ladies. The periodical addresses he received from the Societies established in his name throughout the land nearly filled a room of their own in his Kilburn house. Meredith survives vigorously to be conscious of the same homage. In both cases the invincible indif- ference of the inappreciative has been coerced into a meek acquiescence in the beauties of a genius which it would require the same courage to deny to one as the other. Browning began seriously to write amid those dis- 256 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES quieting influences in Church, in State, and through all ranks of life which attended the passing of the Grey Reform Act. The commencement of Meredith's public course dates from the final and victorious estab- lishment of the modern middle classes. In 1849, when he began to work, the country was receiving the new treasures which came to it from the Australian goldfields opened up just after those of California. The coming age was evidently doomed to materialism ; moral and -intellectual selfishness or indolence was, as Meredith saw, being developed out of prosperity. To this sort of vulgar self-indulgence or indolence the novelist, who commenced as a poet, resolved he would never stoop. Had he been, as to some extent Browning from the first was, surrounded by intellectual friends who saw the force and vitality of an unappreciated poet, and who assured him that by the eternal laws of truth and of mind, his day must inevitably dawn, the courage shown from the first and throughout by Meredith would have been less remarkable. But the novelist was not the idol of any home circle ; still less was he the centre of a literary coterie able to make itself vocal in the press. Technically, one should speak of Dr., not Mr., Meredith ; for he has received the LL.D. degree of at least one Scotch University ; though as a youth he may not himself have gone through the course of any. 257 s PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD In a man whose writings, full of stormy power, mirror the unrest of his century, it would be natural to detect the influences of German University training. The writer, however, was not either at Bonn, Heidelberg, or any Teutonic seat of learning. His classical knowledge is the result of the private tuition of family friends, especially of Thomas Love Peacock, the author of Gryll Grange, Headlong Hall, and many other romances all tinged with a Rabelaisian exuberance. The influence of Peacock, who was the friend, and would have been the adviser, of Shelley, upon subsequent English letters has never been adequately recognized. No new writer of later Victorian days, following Laurence Oliphant, made more of a hit than Mr. W. H. Mallock with his New Hepuhlic. Some other inspiration than that of Plato or Jowett is needed to account historically for this uncommonly clever tour de force. That force is to be found in Peacock more than in any other single author. To the same good scholar and brightly imaginative man one might not only trace back the germ of many among Meredith's writings, but account in the same way for much of their writer's early education. At Halliford-on-Thames, Meredith made Peacock's ac- quaintance, and richly profited by his ripe and accurate knowledge, classical or modem. Peacock, too, it was who in very early days first showed to Thackeray, then editing the Cornhill Magazine, some of George Mere- 258 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES dith's verses. " They have," was the comment of the great man, " the true ring about them. Were it not my fate to make enemies of so many of my contributors by not always being able exactly to meet their views, I should ask you to let your friend fill many pages of the Cornhill." Thackeray then occupied in literary London a position only comparable perhaps with that filled by Ben Jonson in the days of the Elizabethan wits of the " Mermaid." His words to Peacock will not seem sur- prising to those who know the poem in question. It is called The Meeting. It is short, and is a microcosm of so many of its author's qualities that one may give it here — " The old coach road through a common of furze, With knolls of pine ran white ; Berries of autumn with thistles and burrs, And spider threads dropp'd in the light. The light, in a thin blue veil 'peared sick, The sheep grazed close and still ; The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick Curl'd lazily under a hill. No fly shook the round of the silver net ; No insect the swift bird chased ; Only two travellers moved and met, Across that hazy waste. One was a girl with a babe that throve, — Her ruin and her bliss ; One was a youth with a lawless love, Who clasped it the more for this. 259 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The girl for lier babe hung prayerful speech, The youth for his love did pray ; Each cast a wistful look on each, And either went their way." No one who had not mastered each most character- istic feature in the landscapes of Southern England could have produced this moving picture in rhyme. If Meredith never wrote for the Cornhill Magazine under its first editor, it was yet in this periodical that he first signally improved the acquaintance of the general public with him. The Adventures of Harry Bichmond made him known to many more readers — and those of a different class — than The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The curious philo- sophy intertwined with the three heroines of this breezy book first inspired young men and women of the upper middle classes with an enthusiasm for the author. At once little societies for the discussion of Meredith's doctrines, diction, views of men, women, and character were started in every quarter or suburb of London, and at every centre of the circulating libraries throughout the country. After this, the popularity of the writer seems to have experienced a reaction. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that this popularity was not fully established on a lasting basis until Diana of the Crossivays completed its appearance in the Fort- nightly Review during the years of his connection 2G0 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES with the publishers of that periodical. The fame of Bulwer Lyttonas a novelist was a fact in France quite as soon as in England ; his popularity to-day is perhaps greater there than here. Something of the same sort has happened to Meredith. Vittoria came out in the same magazine long before Diana. It had also in French appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and spread its original writer's name throughout Europe, as well as across the Atlantic. Among culti- vated persons in the New World, Meredith, as might have been expected, is, to say the least, not less of a power than among the same sort of persons in the Old. And this for other reasons than the concentration in his genius or in his writings of all the ideas most typical of the time or the compression into his pages of most of its problems. The most universal, he is also among the most thoroughly national of English writers. His juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic, — the vernacular at the point where what is idiomatic shades off into what is only just not coarse ; the subordination to one central and sombre end of the comic verging to the indelicate, or of the purely frivolous, at once suggests the babblings of the old nurse in Romeo quid Juliet. The comparison between George Meredith and George Eliot is obvious, but less appropriate than might at first sight seem to be the case. Both writers 261 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD are of course the reflections and intei-preters of some among the deeper problems of their age. Each of them, therefore, was free to have chosen the moral treatise instead of the fiction as a medium of ex- pression. The diction of the man differs entirely from that of the woman. The involutions and obscuri- ties of Meredith never arise from the intrusion of scientific phrases into literary narrative, but only from the complexity of the subject matter of the writer's own thoughts. The textual difficulties of Meredith are those of the metaphysician agitated at times by the tempestuous whirl of his speculations on character and life ; the hard passages of George Eliot in her later style, that is, of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, reflect the inner mysteries of the Sibyl, who is also a physicist and a student of Vico as well as Comte. In one respect, as compared with Thackeray, Mere- dith does suggest George Eliot. Both writers in their satirical moods avoid the lighter sarcasm of description or comment that Thackeray might have employed; they substitute for it a grave irony of the Socratic kind, clearly conceived, but not readily intelligible on the surface, or until the reader has patiently unwound the intricate word-wrappings which conceal the witticism. The fantastic and exuberant exaggeration that is the chosen form of humour in Evan Harrington brings to the 262 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES mind the more sober and cleanly grotesque of Rabelais ; after the account of " Mel," the tailor of Lymport, and his droll progeny, one almost looks for, as an accompani- ment to the letterpress, an engraving in the style of Dore's illustrations of the Chronicle of Gargantua, Whimsical metaphor is common to Meredith with Dickens, In the hands of Meredith that rhetorical figure is as a giant plant of the tropics by the side of a common bush in a cottage garden. The impression of intellectual strength left by all the Hampshire novelist writes is not the only quality which specially commends him to intelligent and thoughtful women. Men who know their classics may like this writer because, unlike George Eliot, the evolution of his plot so generally proceeds to the Attic accompaniment of well-informed spectators playing the part of a Greek chorus. Without the admirable classical teaching of Peacock, the author would not have employed this special machinery with the happy effect with which it is used in — for example, Sandra Belloni. Only with the Athenian tragedians the chorus is generally com- posed of old men, or of matrons and maids some- what past their first youth. The Meredithian chorus consists almost invariably of bright, piquantly saucy English girls, who say the sprightliest and the most cutting things with the ndiveU of a Nausicaa, or of high-spirited boys, well-bred but ardent. 263 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD As the novelist of women Meredith has shown him- self a force of the first order with his contemporaries. There is only one other with whom his breezy, buoyant pictures of budding womanhood, full of poetry just flavoured with sauciness, can be compared. That is William Black, who has reached thousands not touched by Meredith; The types of girlhood or womanhood in J71 Silk Attire, in A Daughter of Heth, in A Princess of Thule, in Adventures of a Phaeton when first presented, were new to all of us ; each seemed to be environed in an atmosphere of sweet, fresh air, reminding the jaded novel reader of the effect of a window from above sud- denly opened in a heated theatre. As befits a dweller in Tennyson's country, Meredith is much impressed by, and communicates to the innu- merable writers who unconsciously perhaps are influ- enced by him, the " larger hope " in all its applications by the great Laureate. To^it coinprendre cest tout par- donner might be a general motto for the Meredithian series. Here is the reason of his appreciation by foreigners who complain of a lack of art in most Eng- lish fiction: "The metaphysical humour of Meredith only intensifies his essential humanity. None of his characters are entirely good or absolutely bad. Take the case of the adventuress, the daughter of 'Har- rington, tailor,' who knows no moral scruples in her plan to help her brother and rehabilitate the family. 264 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES Foreign countess, she just misses becoming an English duchess. She knows as little of ethical scruple as Becky Sharpe herself; but Thackeray probably had no thought of any of his readers falling in love with Becky in her resourceful wickedness." Meredith so arranges the character of his adventuress, so lets the light fall upon her, that this fantastic com- posite of kindly motives and bad actions steals the affections of the reader. To speak only of his phrasing skill, testimonies to the literary force of Meredith run through contem- porary fiction. Not even Kinglake in Eothen, nor Laurence Oliphant in Piccadilly, set so potent, far- reaching a fashion of literary diction. If R. L. Steven- son has not anjrwhere avowed himself a follower of Meredith, that is because he has taken the public into the general secret of his efforts to reproduce every sort of excellence of word or thought, wherever he might encounter it. One perpetually reads in the newspapers of some parliamentary master lifting by the force of his genius a trivial debate to a higher level. Meredith has done exactly the same thing for the entire craft of contemporary novel writing. Infi- nitely more good work than once ever seemed con- ceivable is now put into fictions that are in every hand. The late James Payn who, as publisher's reader, saw more of manuscript novels than most people, declared 265 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD that, with the acceptance of Meredith as a favourite, there appeared a distinct improvement in the literary- workmanship of the documents with which daily he was called upon to deal. The higher intellectual agen- cies that have been at work since Meredith's day, in addition to a Stevenson, have produced a Conan Doyle, a Merriman, a Stanley Weyman. Those who can com- pare the Waverley era with the present see in the suc- cess of We}Tnan's brilliantly wi-itten novels of French life, especially in A Gentleman of France, an apt parallel to the fascination for young and old alike exercised by the novels of Scott three generations ago. The same studied and successful avoidance of the trite in language, of hackneyed epithets, familiar jargon, of common-place substantives, had been years ago pro- moted by Kinglake and Oliphant ; it had been happily reproduced by Violet Fane in her Sophie; or, Adven- tures of a Savage. What that last book was to a rather earlier day, the best of the novels of Marie Corelli are to the present. This lady is a brilliant type of the thoughtful woman of letters who is not too profound or great for the active work of daily life. She is thus as much as possible the opposite of that type of literary lady who was a social force fifty years ago, and who, studying to improve her kind with the pen of Miss Martineau, found herself too good for ordinary social intercourse with her fellow-creatures. In The Mighty 266 GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS DISCIPLES Atom, the most carefully written and powerful of the Corelli novels, the child may seem to some an impos- sible one, the suicide as ghastly as the whole story is painful. But it is all based on fact, as readers of J. S. Mill's autobiography will recollect. The moral of that autobiography has been cleverly described as " There is no God ; but it's a family secret." The father in The Mighty Atom is a replica of the elder Mill ; if his son avoided the fate of the child in the story, that was not owing to his training being at all wiser than that adopted by " Mr. Valliscourt " for his boy. These are only some of the novels of the period which show a much closer study of real life in its more serious aspects than any of their circulating library predecessors. They also abound in the clearest indications of intellectual pains conscientiously and successfully taken. They are each of them not only writings, but studies. The credit of originating the impulse which has had these happy results is due to George Meredith. He, both as a personal force of his period and a creative humourist, can be compared to no one more properly than to Thomas Carlyle or to Charles Dickens, The Meredithian influence is not confined to fiction. No one, not even Mrs. Riddell, the author of George Geith, has influenced more widely and deeply than Meredith the journalism, the criticism, and 267 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the essay-writing of the day. His verve and insight are, as the writings of Mr. W. L. Courtney, Mr. E. Gosse, Mr. H, D. Traill show, invigoratingly contagious. But it is Mr. W. E. Henley who, both in prose and verse, shows himself the peculiar pupil of this master. The artistic ruggedness of diction, the abrupt turns of rhythm, the surprises of rhyme; above all, the sustained incisiveness of style, the novel expressions that pro- duce an almost surgical effect upon the mind; these are only a few of Mr. Henley's qualities which form a monument to the communicated force of Meredith. 268 ALFRED AUSTIN AND SOME OTHER SINGERS Of well-known writers of our day none has been more consistently or successfully true to an ideal in the ordering of his private life than Mr. Alfred Austin. Like an earlier Poet Laureate, he has written in prose for the periodical political press. What the Review appearing every three months was in the time of Southey, that to a great extent the daily newspaper has become in the time of Southey 's successors. Mr. Austin, moreover, has been a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Rcvieio, as well as to the Standard. Whether he has been contesting at election times a parlia- mentary borough, or summoned to Shoe Lane on journalistic affairs of urgence, no man so busy with his pen has more unbrokenly lived his own life. That has been in his case, as with Southey, the life of a poet. Between Keswick, in Cumberland, when the abode of the earlier Laureate, and Swinford, in 269 PEESON'AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Kent, the home of the younger, a close parallel might be drawn. Southey's prose, and for the most part political writing, was generally done in the morning. Whether a newspaper leader or a periodical essay, in a usual way, Mr. Austin's prose discourses on current events have been finished, often despatched by train to the printer, between breakfast and lunch. As Southey never needed to lose sight of the Keswick waters for his Quarterly articles, so Mr. Austin has been able to combine an immense deal of effective journalism with very infrequent absences from his Kentish villa. Some twenty years ago Mrs. Beecher- Stowe's attack on Byron called for an immediate answer from a judicious disciple of the dead poet. Late on the evening of the day of the publication of the American calumny, Mr. Austin arranged by tele- graph with his London editor to furnish an elaborate reply to the charge without an hour's avoidable delay. Not much after noon on the morrow he sent off the MS. of a dialectically complete refutation of the charge. The article filled something like twelve columns of the Standard. In respect of illustrative circumstantiality of argument, logical arrangement, the demonstration from the internal evidence of the poet's writings of the moral impossibility of Mrs. Stowe's assertion, the composition was admitted by Mr. Austin's least sym- pathetic critics to be complete. It deserves to be re- 270 ALFRED AUSTIN- membered in journalism, both for its thoroughness and rapidity of execution, as a tour de force. But these occupations, effective as they have proved, have been like his parliamentary contests or foreign travels, incidents only or interludes in the career of the man who in 1898 is Poet Laureate. Mr. Austin in fact is not less of a poet because as correspondent for a news- paper during the war of Italian freedom, during the Vatican Council of 1870, he put in shape materials for the historian as well as found themes for his muse, than he ceases to be a man of intellectual pursuits when, according to his custom, top-booted he bestrides his cob for a cross-country gallop, or plays a tennis match with his nearest Kentish neighbour at Hoth- field Place. Beginning, like Byron, in epical or objective vein, he produced the best satires since Bulwer's New Timon. These have more quotable lines than any composition of the same sort published in later Vic- torian days. But, as in the case of all able men, Mr. Austin's poetical course has been one of continuous development. His satire. The Season, became the vogue directly it appeared; dedicated to Disraeli, it secured the warmest recognition of Mr. Gladstone and his old school literary and scholarly friends, than whom no more expert judges of productions in the metre of Pope could have been found. The Season went into its third edition in 1869. The circulation of the other 271 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD satires since their author has combined responsibility with power has not been revived. In later days Mr. Austin has largely occupied himself with poetry of a more subjective and lyrical order than that to which his earlier works belong. His life's task thus far has been The Httman Tragedy, written in several singly complete and mutually independent parts, connected by a continuous thread of central conception consti- tuting the aggregate one artistic whole. His practical knowledge of foreign politics gathered in or for his newspaper work has been turned to first-rate poetical account. Contemporary Europe, the controversies of the age, civil and religious, are really the subject of this fine and well-sustained dramatic composition. The keynote is struck in an early part of the first Canto, devoted as that is to a picturesque analysis of the sentiment of love. But the poet will best explain himself as follows — " Yet not of Love alone, its advent blind, Swift raptures and slow penalties, I sing ; I must be lifted on a fiercer wind, And from the lyre a louder anthem ring ; Still as Religion, Country, or Mankind Bids my weak hand sound more sonorous string. Ah, fatal four ! which by the dark decree Of Heaven evolve the Human Tragedy! " To the following result the scheme of the whole series may be analyzed. As the development of Love 272 ALFRED AUSTIN occupies the first Act, the second Act is concerned with the contest between Love and Religion. Into the third the conception of Country is introduced. The operation of each influence is painted in scenes from Italian history towards the close of 1867. The fourth Act brings a fresh protagonist on the stage, none other than Mankind, the environment being the incidents of the Paris Commune. The clash of motive and of action is set forth in the following stanzas that do in a way epitomize the whole work — " See then, my child, the tragedy, and see What feeds it. Love, Religion, Country, all That deepest, dearest, most enduring be, That makes us noble, and that holds us thrall. Once gone, the beasts were no more gross than we — 'Tis these for which the victims fastest fall ; Man's self in days that are as days that were, Suppliant alike and executioner ! Now once again this tragedy, this jar Of conscience against conscience, hath, meseems, In Paris struck the fiinty flame of war ; Likely, they slay for straws, they die for dreams. But things that seem must still be things that are ; To half-experienced man, who perforce deems He doth not dream, but knows not, nor can know, Till death brings sleep or waiting, is it so." How, it may be asked, are the opposing forces, innate in humanity, between which the struggle lies, to be reconciled? Comes the answer: There is no reconciliation save by the agency of Love. We are 273 T PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD thus brought round by the poet to the point at which we started, the line that opens the poem also ends it — " Oh, Love, undying Love, eternal star." The one characteristic stamping Mr. Austin's as nine- teenth-century work is possessed by him in common with other singers at all steeped in the thought of their period. This is that subdued pessimism which has never been quite silent, and which at the end of the century sounds more audibly in a pathetic minor through most of the art, letters, and philosophy of the day. Mr. W. E. Henley, Mr. E. Gosse, and Mr. W. Watson, all show this quality. In a writer of temper usually so cheerful as Mr. Austin Dobson, the same sentiment is perpetually rising to the surface. Even in a more distinctively literary age than the present, Mr. Austin Dobson would be remarkable as a literary poet. Perhaps the whole Parnassus of England would be searched in vain for a writer who has set forth in strains so brilliant, moving, and varied, the chief facts best lending themselves to poetic treatment in the thought, feeling, and culture of the great ages of the world's history. As regards the succession to Lord Tennyson, when the honour fell upon Mr. Austin, there were several fairly qualified candidates for it, some of them occupy- 274 ALFRED AUSTIN- ing a position in letters not below that of Robert Southey when in 1813 he succeeded Pye. Never were the functions of claimant and judge so creditably united in so many different cases. Mr. Austin had shown himself in the Poetry of the Period a critic of power. Mr. W. E. Henley and Mr. Edmund Gosse were of the same category. Mr. Watts-Dunton, the best known of writers for the weekly literary press, had shown in verse constructive genius that in a less prolific epoch would of itself have won a reputation. Mr. Rudyard Kipling had not only made his mark, but had created a school. Mr. John Davidson, Mr. Stephen Phillips, Mr. Francis Thompson, made the selection of a successor to Lord Tennyson more difficult, because they each of them would not have discredited the office at any epoch. Since the death of Frederick Locker, Mr. Hamilton Aide divides with Mr. Austin Dobson priority among makers of occasional verse. But Mr. Aide has a higher distinction than this ; he powerfully and pathetically reflects the deeper thoughts of his age not less than musically rallies that age on its foibles. In his lines on The Shepherd of Galilee he has produced a sacred poem noticeable for pathos, sincerity of thought, and a music of expression melodiously consonant with its theme. 275 SIR E. BURNE- JONES AND THE P.R.A. Among painters Sir E. Burne-Jones at once suggests himself as the artist of the brush who chiefly reflects the phase of plaintive pessimism already noticed in the art of the poet. A typical artist this, though not exactly of that particular variety most representative in the eyes of the polite world of the famous painter of the period. The Gaston-Phcebus of Lothair was scarcely a cari- cature of the gracious and picturesque presence of the late Lord, though still better known as Sir Frederick, Leighton. The painter, who symbolizes in his person the modern prosperity of his art, really lives in a palace like his literary reflection in Disraeli's novel. Of the shabby days of the easel in its Bloomsbury period no vestige in real life now remains. If another Colonel Nevvcome were seeking a teacher for a second Olive, that preceptor would be found literally in some marble halls of the old Court Suburb, whose artistic 276 SIR E. BURNE-JONES affluence has long since caused it majestically to overflow into Earl's Court and its modish neigh- bourhood. Among the contemporary masters of the brush who adorn the true English School, Mr. Marcus Stone, Mr. Orchardson, Mr. Leslie are each of them finished and prosperous men of the world in social request everywhere. Each of these, with the polished manner the outcome of prosperity as well as breeding (and better specimens of the intellectual gentlemen of England could not be found), impresses the popular mind with a feeling that art can be an exceedingly paying business; each thus, apart from his work, materially improves the status of his profession. The comprehensive impartiality of the national appreciation of all good work could not be better shown than by the popularity of these artists being accompanied with a cordial and increasing recognition of the genius of Sir E. Burne-Jones. " Sad, soulless, silent," is the very old estimate passed on the pictures of this mystic idealist of the brush. There is something in the personality of the artist not entirely incongruous with some, at least, of these epithets. Few of those who try to interpret his can- vases at Burlington House can claim much acquaint- ance in the flesh with their producer. Leighton and Millais, though in different degrees and dissimilar results, were influenced by that pre-Raphaelite school 277 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD through which Sir E. Bume-Jones has also passed, of which indeed some would claim him as the most con- summate product. But, like Stone and Leslie, Leighton and Millais were familiar presences in London clubs and drawing-rooms, as well as at civic dinners, and wherever their art demanded social representation. The thin ascetic figure; the commandingly intel- lectual brow ; the face seamed with the furrows of deep thought — such are some of the personal characteristics of this personal force of his period in art ; they are not often to be met with at club tables or in private houses, save those of a few fit and close friends. Of the intel- lectual influences that went to the formation of the " P. R." brotherhood, so much has of late been written elsewhere as to render technical comment superfluous here. Probably the nature-worship used by some as a synonym for Pantheism in Wordsworth's poetry may explain the intellectual temper which caused the artists now mentioned to lavish such minute attention upon the smallest objects depicted by them. The whole of the animate or inanimate world was, throughout each division of it, an emanation from the Divinely Creative life. That, too, had been the feeling of Virgil when he described himself as the high priest of the Muses, and treated of each division of foliage and insects, of trees and animals, as connected with man by the divine vitality circulating equally through human 278 SIR E. BURNE-JOXES and vegetable existence. Of course this past phase of artistic thought and expression implied a great deal more than what is now summarized. All those self-questionings — the sense of the burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world condensed into Tennyson's "Two Voices" as before that they had been reflected in Wordsworth's Great Ode, as well as querulously in much of Shelley, defiantly and cynically in not a little of Byron — were among the inspiring forces under which the art and intellect of Burne- Jones were formed or furnished. Bom at the beginning of that season of reaction and disappointment which followed the 1832 Reform Act, Sir E. Burne-Jones began his education at King Edward's School in the very Midland capital where popular dissatisfaction with the latest achievement of legislative liberalism was most keen. When from school he proceeded to Exeter College, Oxford, he not only found a congenial and instructive friend in the poet William Morris, but he discovered himself to be in an intellectual atmosphere, above all things calcu- lated to steep in melancholy a brooding temperament like that of the two artistic friends. It was not only Anglican thinkers whom the apparent rather than real failure of the sacramentarian revival and seeming but not actual triumph of Erastianism left in a mood of profound dejection. Those who were ever the 279 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD guests of Dean Milman of St. Paul's, himself not an Oxford man, without themselves having visited the Isis, will have gathered the truth about the spiritual atmosphere of the home of Newman and Pusey about the period of the former's secession to Rome. The agnosticism of early Victorian Oxford most unjustly and inaccurately has been connected with the philo- sophic teachings of Benjamin Jowett. It cannot rightly be referred to any individual, however com- manding his authority, however occult his faith, however philosophic his caution. It was but an illus- tration of the law that makes reaction the sequel of action, and causes the spiritual ebb to wait upon the spiritual flow. There was nothing aggressively im- pious in the negations popular among young Oxford during the forties and the early fifties. Had the cheery and buoyant theological teaching of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, then made themselves felt — as during the next decade they did — the ghostly melancholy that coincided with the undergraduate days of William Morris and Burne- Jones might have been dispelled before it had time to settle upon its votaries. As a consequence the intel- lectual future and artistic work of the painter who has sympathized so profoundly with the inner life of his epoch might have proved very different from that which one knows them actually to have been. It is 280 SIB E. BURNE-JONES not so much that any of the Divine revelations recorded in the inspired writings were openly rejected by the thoughtful and intelligent young men of those days, as that the minds of resident Oxford were perplexed on the real relations between revelation and secular history. On the whole the conclusion generally ac- cepted seems to have been that, as the Greeks had a genius for Art and the Romans for Law, so the Hebrews possessed an exclusive gift of religious dis- covery or creation. Thus the Young Oxford in whose midst Burne-Jones in and after 1853 found him- self, was disposed to regard the religion of the Old Testament as the imposing creation of the Jewish mind in an earlier day ; the theological fabric of the New Testament as the construction of the same inspired builders at a later year of their history. The same saddened temper was not less common, as Tennyson's Maud and Lockslcy Hall may remind one, about the Crimean War era, than the cult of Byronism had been when the life and writings of the author of Childe Harold were on the lips and in the hands of the English reading public. All this has, of course, long since passed away, or (which comes to the same thing) it has been trans- muted into influences that present a different aspect. All that remains of the teaching of Sir E. Burne-Jones and his comrades is its imperishable beauty. The 281 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD average picture-seer may recognize nothing in this great artist but the exquisite blue or some other equally matchless tints in his draperies. But as Lord Leighton, always anxious to admire every sort of excellence among his brethren, was fond of saying, there is no contemporary school of painting nor any individual member of it who, if he be an honest worker, is not, perhaps unconsciously, profiting by the influence and example of Sir E. Burne-Jones. These are the men who among members of their own craft do not so much create a school, or count followers, as diffuse the spirit and purpose of their labours. Certainly in these days, when the degree of artistic success is measured by the material display of artistic prosperity, the example of such a career, the gradual attainment of the highest recognition by such a genius, must be full of healthy influence to all toilers in the studio, and must point a stimulating lesson to every honest and capable labourer in his craft. In respect of art, whether that of the brush, the pen, or the chisel, never was the verdict more true than to-day of that French critic who declared England to be the one European country wherein sooner or later intellectual power persistently displayed in that branch of Art for which the artist may be most fitted is infallibly sure to receive its material reward. Than Sir E. Burne-Jones no living artist is more absolutely free from the faintest con- 282 SIR E. BJJRNE-JONES tagion of French influence. Nor could contrast be more complete than that between his works and those of the Gallicized Americans, Mr. Sargent and Mr. Whistler. Yet one may often see in the same room, sometimes in the same individuals, the reverent students of the pictorial allegories of Sir E. Burne- Jones or Mr. G. F. Watts, and the original impres- sionist effects of a Sargent or a Whistler. Fortunate for the Royal Academy was it, that it had ready so pre-eminently qualified a successor to Millais as Edward Poynter. Educated Englishmen of all classes will never forget the powerful delineations of Eastern, and especially Egyptian, scenes, by the 1898 President of the Royal Academy. Those who pay special attention to such matters may also recall his picture, Ttie, Ionic Dance,, exhibited in that year in which it was his sole contribution to Burlington House — 1897. Never during the present generation has the poetry of motion more perfectly been rendered than in this painting. All those high qualities of a spirit and mind of grace and touch which made Sir E. Poynter's two predecessors great masters, were exhibited or hinted at in this most lovely exhibition of his genius. It contained, too, other touches instinct with a deeper life, wherein one might perhaps see evidence of those influences especially associated with Sir E. Burne-Jones. 283 SIR HENRY IRVING AND OTHER LIGHTS OF THE PLAY Seated in a stage-box at the St. James's Theatre during the spring of 1866 were a gentleman and lady, both distinguished in letters, and both good judges of the art of the player. They were absorbed in the piece performed on the stage ; this happened to be Hunted Down, notable for Miss Herbert's graceful performance of an ungracious part ; on the present occasion specially notable for the appearance with her of Henry Irving, who enacted the villain of the play. Fresh from a clerk's desk in a City office, this young man had, ten years earlier, appeared on the stage for the first time in a Sunderland theatre. His name was then unknown in London, for The, Bells was not to be produced till some years later at the Lyceum by Mr. Bateman. To the inquiry of the lady in the stage-box of her companion, " What do you think of him ? " the answer came, " In twenty years he will be *at the head of the English 284 SIR HENRY IRVING stage." Thoughtfully murmured the lady, "He is there, I think, already." The two interlocutors in the conver- sation now recalled were the novelist known as George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. The former had omitted no form of art from her systematic studies ; the stage does not, indeed, figure in her novels so prominently as music, nor is " Herr Klesmer," who in Daniel Deronda dashes the hopes of " Gwendolen Harleth " so remorselessly to the ground, matched by any one equally autocratic and infallible on the thea- trical boards. But in earlier years Marian Evans had written theatrical notices with the same conscientious industry with which she had translated German neolo- gians. As for Lewes, he was among the most practised critics of the play then living. The articles on this subject that he had written in the Leader — a weekly journal started by the late Edward Smyth Pigott, which, by many years, pre-deceased its founder — have served as models for three generations of critics on the London Press. Lewes may well have felt an instinc- tive sympathy with Irving. Like him, on leaving school, he had served as a clerk first in the office of a notary, second in that of a Russian merchant. Best known perhaps to-day as the founder of the magazine whose early title, still preserved, has long since become a misnomer, Lewes had for years served with his pen as general utility man for many theatres. Five pounds 285 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD seems to have been the regulation fee for adapting — i. e. translating — a French piece for the English public. Many, if not all, of those parts that the art of the younger Mathews made, owed their English dress to the industry of Lewes. Used Up and A Game of Sjoeculatiooi had both been done into his native tongue by George Lewes against time. Hack-work of this sort does not quicken the emotions. The prediction of Lewes is the more remarkable, not only because it has been fulfilled to the letter, but because it came from an already sated observer. Other aids to success than his own stage aptitudes and intellectual power have not been wanting to Irving. Just at the right moment he entered upon a professional heritage which the labours of his prede- cessors had prepared. In the severer drama, Mac- ready first, and Charles Kean afterwards, had begun most effectively the movement for raising up the drama from the low estate to which by a sort of re- action from the glories of the earlier Keans and Kembles it had fallen in the first decade of the Vic- torian age. Both of these were public school men. When Kean and Macready, after their provincial dis- cipline, appeared in London, they were welcomed and supported with all the esp)^it de corps of Eton and of Rugby respectively. Macready, too, anticipated some 286 SIR HENRY IRVING of the support which at a later day Sir Squire Bancroft and Mr. Wilson Barrett have secured from the Church to the Stage. For during his retirement at Sherborne, the older actor instructed many Anglican clergy in elocution ; to Macready perhaps it is partly due that the lessons and the Liturgy of the national Church are not now generally inarticulately mumbled or gab- bled through with the indistinctness which a little earlier had been a tradition, and was not considered an impiety. But unless Henry Irving were a man of exceptional power of mind and clearness of view, these ready-made advantages might have been missed. That his career has been a brilliant and upon the whole a salutary success is due to his possession of qualities that in any other vocation would have won him distinc- tion. Of no one could this be said more appropriately, too, than of a friend of Irving's, a physician not long since dead, the throat specialist, Morell Mackenzie. The German Emperor Frederick, whom he attended, recognized the professional skill of this practitioner, but, like his relatives, was more impressed by his in- tellectual power. He would, was the verdict of the Berlin Court, have risen to a foremost place in any of the arts of war or peace. The same might probably be said of Henry Irving, between whom and his friend the doctor now spoken of there existed much in common. 287 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Mr. Bateman, the father of the actress who played " Leah," had taken the Lyceum to bring out his daughter, without any other immediate object. He also produced Tlie Bells; and his business knowledge may have been useful to Henry Irving. But the credit of perceiving the new position about to be taken by the theatre as an English institution, and mentally ap- praising its audience, was all Irving's own. When his professional reputation was fairly established in the seventies, he began to analyze the composition of the new public as well as to form for his own guidance an estimate of its needs. He noted the enlargement of polite society by the addition of a middle-class contin- gent, serious, thoughtful, well-to-do, great readers, but demanding a stronger counter-irritant to business cares than books. For this obviously the stage, such as Irving thought he could make it, was the one thing needful. After the success of Charles Kean's Shake- sperean revivals at the Princess's, Irving knew that in regard to scenic perfection he must not fall below his predecessor. Nor, as he also perceived, was it less necessary to infuse into his representations an intellect- ual flavour of their own. So long as the whole pro- duction was stamped with the mark of mental study, of poetic feeling, and of suggestiveness to thoughtful minds, many errors of extravagance in gesture or elocu- tion would be forgiven ; many infelicities or eccentrici- SIE HENRY IRVING ties of voice, bearing, or manner would not only be condoned, but would become elements of success. Pay the public the compliment of moving in it the sort of interest which would satisfy its mental vanity; the actor never doubted that its solid patronage would neither be withheld nor withdrawn. If Henry Irving lacked some advantages of form and face, he conspicu- ously possessed the commanding gift of a strongly defined personality, which he could easily make a very interesting one. The plastic power of countenance belonging to this actor is probably not greater than that which is part of the stock-in-trade of many of his contemporaries. No artist of the stage, however, has shown the same remarkable faculty of suggesting, not merely on the stage, but in any private company as well, an identity not his own. In making the actor a knight, Lord Rosebery is known only to have fulfilled an intention which fate did not enable Disraeli to carry out. That purposed compliment has been often repaid the earlier Premier by the player. In many Conservative country houses, as Henry Irving has entered the drawing-room before dinner, the words have almost mechanically shaped themselves on the lips of the company : " Dizzy risen again ! " — all this without any effort of mimicry on the actor's part, but by a subtly suggestive process, as it might almost seem, of hypnotism. Elsewhere 289 u PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD the original recalled would be the high priest of a different political confession. Nature, therefore, if she has denied him some things, has not withheld from Henry Irving the quality of interesting all sections of the English public in a way that has been given to very few of those who trod the stage before him. The ideal dramatist for Henry Irving would have been, no doubt, Bulwer Lytton, whose mysticism the actor might have interpreted as if he had been the author's second self. As it is, however, none of the distinguished men of letters with whom he has been thrown have failed to be as deeply impressed by Irving as was Lord Tennyson himself. With the insight of genius, the poet knew Irving to have been cast by nature for the part of the ecclesiastical Churchman, Becket. That qualification arose out of the place and associations of the actor's earliest days. The traditions and images with which the atmosphere of Cornwall is charged, and which coloured so deeply the religious views of its accomplished poet, R. S. Hawker, were not wanting to the neighbourhood where Henry Irving was born and bred. Spiritually his birth-place of Keinton Mandeville may be described as over- shadowed by the neighbouring Abbey of Glastonbury ; amid its ruins the youth Irving often played, dress- ing and enacting with such resources as his home 290 SIR HENRY IRVING could supply, the part of the great Dunstan, who was Glastonbury's first Abbot, whose learning educated the district, and whose tastes expressed in the miracle plays of his epoch gave the dwellers in the Mendips the only taste they ever can have had in their lives of the acted drama of the stage. Tennyson, not less than Taine, believed in the in- fluence of the local environment of the child upon the aptitude of the man, and was confident that the protagonist in his new play would acquit himself better in the part for having as a child " played at priests" with his companions in the ruined aisles of the Somersetshire cathedral. Thus, the experiences of childhood were specially useful to Henry Irving in adding one of the latest to his successful roUs. Hereditary interest in the historic associations of this neighbourhood may explain the choice by Mr. Irving's son of Judge Jeffreys (whose notoriety began in Somersetshire) as the subject of a well-argued and purposely paradoxical thesis. Mere histrionic excellence as little as conformity to, or improvement on, stage traditions, explains the uniform favour with which the public has received all the impersonations of this actor from what are technically called the character parts, such as Jingle, to the new reading of " Richard III.," and the humanized version of Shylock. The quality this 291 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD player has taught the public to expect from him is a thoughtful ingenuity. All his best work has been distinctively his own ; it has borne on its sur- face signs of the patient operations of no common intellect. In his preparation of a part, as in the Lyceum "presentation of a play, there is never scamped work. The conception of character may be right or wrong in itself; gallery, pit, boxes, and stalls see in Irving's rendering of his role an assur- ance of an intellectual justification for the light in which he gives it to his patrons. On leaving the theatre the whole audience carries away and uncon- sciously cherishes a subtle sense of personal compli- ment paid to each in a performance whereon the player has deemed it his duty to his patrons mani- festly to expend so much of mental effort and artistic care. In the method of his execution of his task, Irving may have profited by those who have been before him ; the reception given to his work has exercised a stimu- lating influence on others of his craft. Mr. Beerbohm Tree, Mr. Wilson Barrett and Mr. George Alexander, copy no single exemplar. But for the inspiring success of the Lyceum manager, none of these might have been encouraged to expend upon their parts and their plays quite so much of those qualities of intellect and wisci generosity of material preparation which, 292 SIR HENRY IRVING first brought to his business by Irving, have been forthcoming in like profusion and with like results among his rivals and comrades in the profession. If contemporary foreign opinion be the anticipation of the judgment of native posterity, there can be little doubt as to the estimate which will finally be formed of Henry Irving's work on the British stage, or that it will be practically identical with the view of him taken in the foregoing lines. Some thii-ty years since the drama's decline was a stereotyped headline for letters in the Times and else- where, deploring, whether in respect of actors or dramatists, the decadence of the stage. In the comic papers less pessimistic wits, especially those who wrote under the guidance of the late Tom Hood, including Mr. W. S. Gilbert and Mr. Clement Scott, sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse, made out a good case for a less gloomy conclusion. That more hopeful horoscope has been justified by the brighter era in stage history that began with Tom Robertson's plays and the Bancroft company at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in the later 'sixties. The movement, fairly started with the Society series, has been continued and progres- sively improved by competent successors till it has attained the combined excellence of literary workman- ship and of stage craft, shown in Mr. Pinero's Projiigate and Tlie Second Mrs. Tanqueray. The 293 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD author of these pieces is only one of several play- wrights all of whom are still young, and from whom work increasingly good may be anticipated for some time to come. If the dialogue of Mr. H. A. Jones in The Middleman and Judah was alternately mov- ing and powerful, it is wrought with much more brilliancy into the texture of Behcllious Susan and The Liars. None of the praise due to the men now mentioned for mastery of their craft, such as a generation ago belonged to Tom Taylor, Dr. Westland Marston, Dion Boucicault, not less than to Sir Edward Bulwer himself, can be withheld from Mr. Sydney Grundy, even though his level of originality be not uniformly sustained at the highest point. Charles Reade was among the first to show the inspiration to be found by a skilful artist in the news- paper reports. The most representative forces among latter day play-wrights have been equally true to nature in their conceptions and their treatment. In combinations that are really original, they have com- bined the humorous and melodramatic elements of their predecessors. The result is a stage to-day that is at once truer to nature, and f;ir more amusing as well. Some share in this consummation must be allowed to the dramatic critics of the periodical press. Thirty 294 SIFl henry IRVING years ago John Oxenford, of the Times, Edward Leman Blanchard, on the Daily Telegrajjh,!!! point of knowledge of their subject, insight into popular feeling, were regarded as in advance of most writers on theatrical subjects. A pre-eminence so unique would scarcely be their lot to-day. Among the men who fill their place by experience, variety of learning, lifelong preparation for the work, a front place is due to Mr. Moy Thomas. With him must be bracketed in respect of scholarship, tender and disciplined imagination, Joseph Knight, who, in his day, has rendered more services, by his counsel and good word, to younger writers as they have grown up, than often falls to the lot of one man. Mr. Clement Scott had the double advantage of the training of a father, the most accurate and well- informed among journalistic scholars of his day, and of beginning his own critical work in the early days of the •dramatic revival of a generation and a half since. The original and powerful critic of the play, best known by his initials, has withdrawn himself from the columns so long associated with the letters " G. B. S." The same influences that formed this writer, as they have helped to form actors, too, may be seen still operative in Mr. William Archer and in Mr. A. B. Walkley. Before either of these became the power he has long since proved himself to be, the late Button Cook, 295 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD first in the Pall Mall Gazette, under Frederick Green- wood, then in The World, under Edmund Yates, set an example of theatrical criticism at once sympathetic, discriminating — equally removed from the earlier traditions of partisanship or animosity " to order." 296 LONDON HOSTESSES A VERY clever authoress of the day has declared the- movement of the female unemployed to be the great j)roblem of the expiring century. Miss Olive Schreiner possesses enough of original power to have ensured her literary success in the absence of any patroness or patron of literary genius embodied in whichever sex, whether fully or incompletely engaged by the jDublishers. As a fact before The Story of a So2Uh African Farm had been discovered by the press to be a very striking book, its remarkable qualities had revealed themselves to the discerning eyes of a lady who is conspicuous among the personal forces in the drawing-rooms of the period. Sir Arthur Hayter comes of a family of Parliamentary Whips. His labours in organizing politicians in the lobbies have long been seconded by those of his wife in socially cementing the party ranks by the hospitalities of private life. The critical instinct is hereditary with 297 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Lady Hayter. " In the Glades and Galleries of the Deep-Dene," the novel of Coningsby was mentally com- posed and partly written by its author, — the friend and guest of the master of that picturesque Surrey House, — Thomas Hope. This accomplished man, best known from the title of his novel, Anastasius, was Lady Hayter s ancestor, who from their tenderest years trained his children in the arts of intellectual conversation and the principles of literary taste. The story is not much read now; when it appeared Europe was filled with its fame ; artists of every country tried to re- produce with their brush the powerful scene in which the chief figure in the story is seated on the steps of the lazaretto at Trieste with his dying boy in his arms. Disraeli was only one of the notable and regular visitors to her relative's roof. While still of an age for nursery rather than school-room, she had been in the company of probably all the most famous men and women whom Europe, perhaps the world, at that time contained ; for Thomas Hope had as a young man been a gi-eat traveller and a collector of curiosities, including human celebrities, at every point between the Alhambra and the Dardanelles. His house in Portland Place was not less a world-renowned centre than his house just outside Dorking. From this father the late Mr. Beresford-Hope inherited his remarkable taste in a knowledge of all architectural matters and 298 LONDON HOSTESSES whatever belongs to the curiosities of letters, history, or civilization in which the younger as well as the elder Disraeli found his recreation as well as his study. Anastasms, though the best known, is but one of the works on which Thomas Hope expended a labour and a personal research commensurate with wealth lavished on the bringing together of his artistic treasures. The influence of such an environment on the little Miss Hope of those days must of course have been largely unconscious. But children can no sooner observe at all than they imbibe the social and intellectual, not less than the moral atmosphere in which their infancy is nurtured. Very long before she was " out," Miss Hope, by those who like Disraeli had an expert's eye in these matters, was known as one of those hostesses of the future who would make her house instrumental in raising the tone, as well as humanizing the inter- course, of polished society. Long since these promises have been fulfilled, nor is there any London house beneath whose roof more, socially, was done to prepare the way for and to impart prestige to the Gladstonian victory of 1880 than the house in Grosvenor Square, then occupied by Sir Arthur and Lady Hayter. Not many doors from that abode is another London home, whose master and mistress have in no less degree contributed to the building up of the social fortunes of the Liberal party. 299 FEFSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD The home-coming of Lord and Lady Aberdeen from Canada in 1898 is anticipated as an epoch in the gradual process of the Liberal rally after the disasters of 1886 and 1895. Mr. Gladstone, though he enjoyed a certain kind of London Society and made himself very agreeable in it, never appreciated as warmly or as indiscriminately as his great rival, the social fusion whose completion belongs to our day, and which, according to Mr. Disraeli in Endymion, has transformed London from a very dull into a very amusing capital. The new Conservatism, started by Disraeli, and further organized by Lord Randolph Churchill, is of a much more cosmopolitan complexion than suited Mr. Glad- stone — himself as old-fashioned in social tastes as he was tenacious of precedent in his official views. Lady Aberdeen's drawing-room on a reception night in Grosvenor Square was one of the places where Mr. Gladstone presented himself in his mellower and wholly delightful aspect. It was the same in the suburban menage of this family at Dollis Hill, rather more than an hour's drive from the Marble Arch. There can be few more characteristic or delightful memories of the statesman than those possessed by persons who liave been his fellow-guests at Dollis Hill, Lady Aberdeen has taken a leading i)art in every Metropolitan good work, from the reclaiming of the lost, or the organization of feminine Liberalism on 300 LONDON HOSTESSES the Thames, to the feasting of Sunday-school children (a magazine for whom she once edited) in her pleasure- grounds in the N.W. district. The simplicity that was so beautiful a trait in the statesman never failed to show itself on these occasions, not less prettily than at like seasons in Ha warden Park. He talked, laughed, played at " hunt-the-slipper " with them ; he sang, he even danced with them, sometimes he actually ran races with them. Once he delighted them by running a race with (and coming in a good winner by a head) another sprightly young octogenarian, the late Sir Andrew Clarke, the physician. Nor in Grosvenor Square itself had the Aberdeens any more delightful or infallibly or easily amused guest than this great and good man. Beneath this roof it was that most of the rising representatives of art and letters, whom Mr. Gladstone desired to know, were asked to meet their host's political chief. In 1898 the burden of hospitalities, on the Con- servative side, seems to be divided between Sir Michael •and Lady Hicks-Beach at their official residence in Downing Street, and Lord and Lady Stanhope at the historic house which is now 20, Grosvenor Place, but which, when first occupied by the late Lord Stanhope the historian, while still Lord Mahon, was 3, Grosvenor Houses. The full story of that dwelling would be the narrative of socio-political and socio-literary England 301 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD during no small part of this century. The late Lord Stanhope gave breakfasts and dinners as celebrated as, and rather more variously attended than, those of Samuel Rogers, or Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. With the then Sir Edward Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, and to some degree with Lord Lansdowne, Lord Stanhope, the founder of the National Portrait Gallery, shared national prominence as a representative man of letters, as well as a patron of all the pursuits and individuals that could minister to the intellectual life of the nation. Though an active and regular figure at all the meetings of the intellectual clubs and other associations of the day, Lord Stanhope's life as a literary host was, as Bulwer Lytton's was not, essenti- ally a domestic life. The domestic tradition, whether at Chevening or at Grosvenor Place, is still strong in the Stanhope family, and gives a distinguishing character to the Stanhope receptions. In another member of the house, who in 1898 sits for Burnley, the Stanhopes possess not only the one Radical of their house since Charles, the third Earl, better known as " Citizen " Stanhope in the last century, but also an accomplished man of the world, who, more than any one else, goes near to filling to-day the same sort of place in the social system of London as w^as occupied once by Charles Grevillc the Diarist, as, on his dis- appearance, was disputed by several less well-known 302 LONDON HOSTESSES successors. Eventually, perhaps, there stepped into the place two members of the Eraser trio, the soldiers, Charles and Keith. But the man who most closely reproduced that consummate knowledge of the world, reduced b}^ Greville to a science, was the late Henry Calcraft, who is mentioned in this volume in con- nection with the Times newspaper. That the Lord and Lady Stanhope of 1898 as host and hostess have entered into all the family inheritance is due not only to their personal aptitudes but to the fact of so much of their earlier days having been passed beneath their father's eclectically hospitable roof. As a daughter of the house of Fortescue, Lady Lucy Hicks-Beach was born into so famous a centre of West of England gatherings as Castle Hill, in North Devon. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach has had the training, not only in well-nigh every branch of the public service of a thorough-going official, but also at the covert side, in the hunting field, and at Quarter Sessions of the ideal country gentleman. Such preparations explain sufficiently the social and political usefulness of the dinner parties and receptions at 10, Downing Street. 303 SOME PERSONAL FORCES — LESS VISIBLE BUT NOT LESS REAL In one of Disraeli's latest novels there is a touch which shows his keenness in observing characteristic features of society and politics when he had resigned himself to comparative abstinence from political action. " If," says one of his subordinate personages, supposed to be speaking in the first half of the century, " you wish to know who the coming forces of Europe are, you must look at a young Frenchman scribbling an article at a student's cafe in the Latin quarter, and at a beer- drinking, duelling, Prussian student, brooding over his future and present in an attic in a German University. The real makers of history and pullers of the wires are seldom before the public." This may be as true now of some among the personal forces of 1898 as it was of Gambetta and Bismarck when the novelist roughly etched their figiires and clearly foresaw their greatness. The 304 SOME PERSONAL FORCES barristers, Chancery or Common Law, who are to-day making the largest incomes, are not necessarily those whose names appear most often in the newspaper reports, or who are favourites in the running for the Woolsack. All professional incomes are apt to be overrated ; none more so than those of doctore. The physician whose revenues are the secret envy of the whole healing fraternity is not necessarily the occupant of the finest house in Cavendish Square or Harley Street. The wealthiest power on the Stock Exchange does not always, or perhaps often, drive the highest-stepping horses to the South Eastern railway station from his country house on the Caterham line, appear in Capel Court with the rarest orchid mounted in his button- hole, or lunch most magnificently with his West End friends at a Pall Mall club. Enter that same club you will see the most quietly prosperous physician in pot hat and reefer suit before he starts on a professional visit in Europe at a fee close on, or quite of, four figures, preparing for his journey in the club library with a cup of tea, a slice of brown bread-and-butter, and by way of appetizer, a blue book containing some fresh hints for medical legislation in which this grave and silent healer, who happens to sit for his University, intends to take an active part, and thereby make a fresh mark. 305 X PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD Do'v\Ti-stairs in the coffee-room of the same club is a comely, still youthful, though rather portly lawyer, known among his friends as " William the Silent." Recently, though he might have done so more than once before, he has taken silk, and entered the House of Commons ; he has already influenced his age and profession on the Council of Legal Education; he is the greatest authority on contracts in England; he is employed in all the heaviest commercial cases mentioned only in the professional journals ; he has this day been offered the Attorney-Generalship when his party comes into power; he will in due course proceed as naturally to the Lord Chancellorship as a Hamilton or a Stanhope passes at an early stage of his evolution to a junior Lordship of the Treasury, or, en route for the Cabinet, to an Under Secretaryship of State. In this way one might truthfully deal with most of the vocations of the day. On the same premises, at the same moment, though in other walks of intellectual industry, instances of the same sort could be found. Thanks not merely to the repeal of the Paper Duties and the growth of the modern public generally, but specially to the influences of journalists like Frederick Greenwood, Sir Edward Lawson, John Morley before he had changed the press for Parliament, and Mr. W. 306 SOME PERSONAL FORCES H. Mudford, newspaper writing has become a real and not exceptionally precarious profession. The anonymity of the press diminishes indeed every day. Still, as for the most powerful and successful writers, even editors, on it, whatever may be the case with their names, their personalities are often but little known. Here dining on a cutlet, a bottle of Apollinaris, and half-a-pint of sound claret before he goes to his office in Shoe Lane, is a wiry, sinewy figure of a gentleman of the press, scarcely yet arrived at the threshold of middle age. Wisely recognizing the truth of the maxim that, so long as one remains in the background, one may have any power one chooses in journalism, this gentleman, of whose literary and organizing power no second look at the pale, lofty brow and the firmly-cut mouth is needed to convince one, has for years been the most strenuous and puis- sant worker on the daily press. It is Mr. George Byron Curtis, not merely the editorial coadjutor, but in all matters of confidential business the alter ego of Mr. W. H. Mudford, the life editor and manager of the journal that combines breadth and moderation of view with loyalty to the historic principles of Toryism. Seated near Mr. Curtis is one of his friends and colleagues, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, an Oxford scholar of repute, with few equals, perhaps no superiors, in his craft in the knowledge dra\vn from original documents, 307 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD and great teachers, dead or living, who have been great statesmen as well, on all that concerns the secret history of Senate and Church. Only the other day those whose names are to-day in every publisher's list were scarcely less talked about than some of the lights of the press revealed in the foregoing words. Nothing in our days is more noticeable than the extent to which Oxford and Cambridge have become the nursing mother of successful journalists and popular favourites. This movement began with the brilliant success in popular letters of most of that little group which was the boast of Wadham College, Oxford, now between forty and fifty years ago. Not at Wadham was trained Sir Edwin Arnold of the severe presence, and, at his choice, master of the classic or romantic muse, who in his Oxford days was a scholar, like his friend of the philosopher's mind and Guardsman's presence, Mr. W. L. Courtney, of the reputed foundation of Alfred the Great. Near him is seated in the same club room now visited Sir Edwin Arnold's editorial colleague, Mr. John Le Sage, who perhaps more than any of his generation resembles in editorial acumen and judgment his predecessor in what was once Peterborough Court, Mr. Thornton Hunt. By his inspiring and incisive expression, Mr. Frederic .308 SOME PERSONAL FORCES Harrison attracted almost as many clever young gradu- ates to periodical writing as, among school-boys, Marryat sent to sea, Charles Lever, James Grant, or Whyte Melville into the army. The article written by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the Westminster Review on the forgotten Oxford Essays and Beviews exercised more of literary contagion and excited more of emulation than probably any other single piece that ever appeared in this periodical. Its effect on the academic composi- tions of the period was curiously and at once visible ; it nerved a then Fellow, as he had been before scholar, of Corpus Christi, Mr. H. de B. Hollings, in a discourse on criticism, to produce what Mr. Jowett declared to be the most promising essay that had ever won the Vice Chancellor's prize. To this period must be re- ferred the earlier beginnings of two men who as regards prowess in the production of hellcs lettres have surpassed most writers since Thomas Love Peacock. A student conscious or unconscious of that remarkable writer, Mr. W. H. Mallock, produced in Tlie Nevj Republic a book which made the first great popular hit since Laurence Oliphant's Piccadilly. Mr. Mallock's gift of dialogue is shared with him by Mr. H. D. Traill, whose imitations of Lucian are already on a fair way to becoming classics, and by Mr. Andrew Lang, who, if an example of industry and productiveness to all aspirant writers, reminds them that style is to some 309 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD extent a matter of study; that that which is the easiest to read may require the greatest labour to produce, and that there is no training more useful for popular authorship than that of the laborious and long silent scholar. 310 MR. CECIL RHODES AND HIS FRIENDS Colonial wealth and energy have several permanent representatives in the mother country. The most impressive member of this class, Sir Samuel Wilson, was once the tenant of the country house of the states- man who lived to regret his scornful words about the Colonies — addressed to Lord Malmesbury. That colonial magnate is no longer with us. But Sir Samuel Wilson's son when he appears among us does so with a circumstance befitting a great Australian landlord. The prosperity of West Australia is reflected in Mr. Whittaker Wright, of Lea Park, Witley. As for South Africa, Mr. J. B. Robinson, Mr. Beit, both of Park Lane, Mr. Wernher, of Bath House, Piccadilly, are only a few London figures whose names have in their life passed into a proverb. The widow of the chief millionaire of the class, Mrs. Barney Barnato has chosen the London-super-mare of Brighton as the scene of her good or kindly works. 311 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD But for the most quickening of personal forces in colonial matters, one must look only at Mr. Cecil Rhodes. The character of the man is written in the very remarkable features of his face, as in his yet more noticeable manner. His career has been of so con- tinuously stirring a kind as to run a risk of finding its way to the fabulous before he who has made it shall have come to middle age. While as yet the name of Cecil Rhodes was not public property, its owner had begun to be, even as an undergraduate at Magdalen, Oxford, a power making for the expansion of Greater Britain. One hears of Eton being proud of this, her strenuous and successful son. The family relationship is, however, misstated. The school of Mr. Cecil Rhodes is Bishop's Stortford, a still famous, though to-day rather strug- gling foundation, on which her old alumnus has bestowed some marks of grateful regard. The Etonian of the family is the brother, Colonel Frank. Debonair, popular, and not a severe student, Colonel Rhodes still lives for his athletic prowess in Eton memories, and late in the 'fifties was one of the Light Blue eleven that played against Harrow. At Oxford a colonial epoch was beginning during the residence there of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Among members of the Imperial Parliament generally re- corded as attending Mr. Rhodes to, or meeting him at 312 MR. CECIL RHODES AND HIS FRIENDS the railway station when he visits or leaves this country, Mr. Rochefort Maguire is prominent — a member of the same organized interest that reckons also as belonging to it the Duke of Fife, Lord GifFord, perhaps Lord Grey and Mr. Causton. On the Isis Mr. Maguire was not the sole colonial contemporary of Mr. Rhodes, for Sir Charles Metcalfe was at the same time an undergraduate of University College. All these young men, destined to notoriety in the same sphere, were of the same academic genera- tion ; most of them were in the same University set. JVIr. Cecil Rhodes rode to hounds wisely and well. He distinguished himself in the college or inter-college " horse grinds," more general then than perhaps they are to-day ; he was a member of the Bullingdon Club ; known for his clever management of a clever horse. He acted as Master of the University drag hounds — a post which was also held by the oarsman Mr. W. H. Grenfell. Before weak health had caused him to take a vacation voyage to the Cape, the opportunities of the greater Britain beyond seas had fascinated his mind, and often coloured his casual talk with his friends. On the return from the first South African trip, colonial interest had become in him South African enthusiasm. The country, its international position, its magnificent possibilities now filled the same place in his thoughts as to more home-staying, if 313 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD not less aspiring youths might be taken by the chances of a political or military career. His conversation on the subject was not in general much heeded by his contemporaries. The novelist, Charles Reade, then still living, sometimes revisited the college of which he was titularly a don, and Mr. Rhodes an undergraduate. Magdalen traditions favour an intercourse between those in and out of pupilari state more friendly than is common on most foundations. The dons' common room, so the story goes, was in the hands of workmen and cleaners ; the novelist accepted an invitation to the common room of the undergraduates. If, like Mr. Rhodes, he had not visited the scene of its incidents before writing his colonial novel of Never too Late to Mend, Charles Reade after his usual fashion had got up the whole subject most thoroughly ; he encouraged his junior and host to speak freely with him. In con- versation between Charles Reade and one of his friends a Merton graduate, also interested in colonial subjects as well as one of the first of our " old Norwegians," Sir Henry Pottinger, Reade remarked of the then Magdalen undergraduate, that he rather thought he had accidentally encountered a youth destined one day to be a leader of men in some foreign community still jjcrhaps unborn. The impression that in his crude youth Cecil Rhodes had produced on the mature student of life and 314 MR. CECIL RHODES AND HIS FRIENDS character was felt more powerfully among his con- temporaries ; an interest in things colonial was among the legacies to Oxford undergraduates left by Rhodes of Magdalen. Lord Randolph Churchill must have been in residence during part at least of the time of Mr. Rhodes. The two men never seem to have met; in the fitness of things they ought to have done so, for originality and independence of character were not the only two points wherein they resembled one another. Many of the literary tastes, the intellectual fortes and foibles of the two were curiously alike. Neither was a student. Each had the same faculty of reading up a subject under pressure, as well as of continuing for choice an interest in a topic first studied from com- pulsion. The favourite authors of both were nearly the same. Of such authors, too, both had the same power of easily and correctly committing to memory impressive passages. Randolph Churchill and Cecil Rhodes were alike content with a pass. When their college days were over, they both did much of the reading, and showed not a little of the industry that might have been recognized in the Honour schools. The favourite author common to each of them was Gibbon; in the Decline and Fall the two young men might have mutually examined each other by capping famous passages. Churchill could recite parts of chapters entire. Rhodes might at one time have 315 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD written down from memory most of the passages which a Quarterly Beviewer would select to illustrate the jjhilosophical temper and the literary style of the author. The polyglot notes in the later parts of the historian, sometimes perplexed Mr. Rhodes, He caused every fragment of foreign language to be translated for himself, and interleaved his edition with this version. With Cecil Rhodes, in a degree that was not the case with Randolph Churchill, the Roman historian awoke or stimulated the taste for those literatures whence his materials were derived. Dissatisfied with the regula- tion " cribs," the future South African statesman caused a translation of Latin and Greek classics he specially admired to be made by a person he selected into his native tongue. Some of these renderings perished in the fire that some time ago destroyed his house, Groot Schuur. Many of them are still preserved. As a memorial of him at whose suggestion they were made, when, if ever, given to the world, they will have no small interest. No one, indeed, of our day has held public interest of all kinds so long or at so high a ])<)int of tension as this man whose name ten years ago was unknown. Most of the attractions and vicissitudes centred in the Dark Continent seem summed up in the person or career of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. The manner of doing it, not less than what he has done, has recom- mended hiin to the English public. A youth and early 316 MR. CECIL RHODES AND HIS FRIENDS manhood indistinguishable from those of scores of honest young Englishmen, were followed in his case by a career of colonial adventure and achievement with no more of apparent effort than, and quite as naturally as, the establishment of a reputation among his friends at home as a bold rider in the English shires, or a good shot on the northern moors. That quiet and un- advertised development has of course, fortunately for Mr. Rhodes, coincided with the representation of colonial wealth and intelligence in Parliament, at Westminster, and in Society at the West End. Lord Donoughmore was only one among the earliest and therefore the best known to bring back a bride among the spoils of his colonial tour. But while Mr. Rhodes and others have been quietly winning their way to wealth and power in the greater Britain beyond the four seas, there has been organized at various social centres in the Old Country a colonial society, which in point of material resources and attractiveness of mode, competes with the growth of the fashionable colony from the other side of the Atlantic that since the fall of the Second Empire has found its headquarters on the Thames rather than on the Seine. Cape diamonds, Cape millionaires, Zulu wars, would not without Mr. Rhodes have made South Africa the fashion. That quarter of the world is large enough for England, France, Germany; whether for Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Kruger and Mr. Rhodes has still to be seen. 317 MR. W. W. ASTOR AND THE AMERICAN COLONY To belong to a family which has founded one of the most modern and the wealthiest of trans- Atlantic indus- tries, which has been commemorated by the greatest trans-Atlantic prose writer of his epoch, is, even among the American favourites of fortune, a dis- tinction. Such is the hereditary lot of the leading member of the American colony now settled in fashion- able London. That position belongs to Mr. W. W. Astor in virtue not only of his wealth, his hospitality, his courtesy, his geniality, but because he generally satisfies the ideal of an Anglo-Saxon gentleman. His grace, dignity, simplicity of manners, his kindliness of heart, the easy and finished urbanity, shown alike beneath his own roof in Carlton House Terrace, Clieveden, or in general society, are further supports to the title he has made his own. Moreover he is permanently settled in our midst. Since 1863, when Anglo-Americans became the fashion, millionaires from the New World have often 318 MB. W. W. ASTOR appeared among us. The young Duke of Marl- borough's marriage to a daughter of the Vanderbilts was only one of the latest in a series of such matches. But it is comparatively seldom that the father makes, as Mr. Astor has made, England his family home. That which professional pedigree mongers can always perform for any well-to-do patron, of whatever country, was accomplished before the jsresent representative of it was born for the family of Astor by the jDen of Washington Irving. Early in the century Washington Irving had met at Montreal certain partners of the Great North-West Fur Company. Hence his earliest interest in all relating to trappers, hunters, Indians and the whole trade in peltries. Returning to New York in 1812 the American author discussed the whole subject with the great-grandfather of the head of the Astors, in 1898, being in 1812 the first of fur merchants in the United States. Such was eighty-six years ago the ancestor of the Waldorf Astor whom London knows to-day — John Jacob Astor. The name preceding his patronymic came to him from Waldorf, a German village near Heidelburg, close to the Rhine. Anti- cipating as a boy his eventual possession of no common wealth, he started from his native place for Europe, there to push his fortunes. Before settling in London, whither he had proceeded direct from his birth-place, 319 PERSON'AL FORCES OF THE PERIOD he visited the United States in or about the year 1784. On his voyage out he saw much of a fellow passenger of his own race engaged in the fur trade, very com- municative on the details of his business. On disem- barking, Jacob Astor went with this companion of his voyage to New York ; there on his friend's advice he invested in furs and skins the profits gained in some other trade. His new purchases were at once taken by him to London, and sold at great profit. Astor now returned to New York with a view of settling in the States and confining as far as might be his business to that side of the ocean. But the purely American fur trade was not yet developed enough to be very lucrative. Astor, therefore, visited Montreal once a year to buy peltries. No direct trade from Canada to any country but England being then practicable, as quickly as he bought his furs and hides he shipped them to London direct. In 1795 the re- strictions on Canadian trade were removed by treaty. Astor made a contract for furs with the North- West Company, imported them from Montreal into the United States; thence he transported his goods to all parts of Europe, to some parts of China. The 1795 treaty surrendering the British possessions on the American side of the Lakes opened up Canada and the adjacent tracts to the American fur trade. In little more than twenty years aft^r starting, by 1807, 320 MR. W. W. ASTOR Astor was among the richest of American traders. In the Mackinaw Company he had a formidable rival. Knowing the wish of the United States Government to keep the fur trade to its own citizens, Astor under- took, if supported by his Government, to turn the whole trade into American channels. The result of this proposal was in 1809 a Charter from the New York legislature incorporating a company styled the American Fur Company with a capital of 3,000,000 dollars. The directorate existed only in name. The whole company was really Astor. His were the re- sources, his the directing mind for the conduct of the business. By the efforts of Captain Gray, Captain Jonathan Carver, and of others recorded in Washing- ton Irving's " Astoria," the way had in some sort been prepared for Aster's work. Only a genius for organization, for finance as well as for diplomacy of a sort, could have taken up all these tangled threads, diverse and conflicting interests, fashioned them into one immense business of infinite complexity indeed, but harmonized and controlled in all its parts into vigorous unity by one directing will. Thus far as regards the house of Astor as com- memorated by Irving. That writer, born in 1783 was at work till 1859. To an American of a younger generation it was reserved to describe other influences of later members of the house of Astor upon the taste 321 Y PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD and culture of the well-to-do classes in the United States. Whether he be called charlatan or artist, Edgar Allan Poe, born in 1809, therefore Washington Irving's junior by twenty-six years, possessed a quick if not always a correct eye for picturesque effects; he had a keen sense of the sins of some of his country- men against propriety and taste, whether in the de- coration of their houses or the choice of their reading. Some of his comparatively unknown writings are really sermons on these subjects addressed to the more wealthy and luxurious of the United States middle classes. Such with respect to the inside of their houses was Poe's philosophy of furniture. Such, as regards the arrangements of their private grounds, was his Domain of Arnheim. His examples of what to avoid were taken from the nameless among the vulgar rich. His examples of what to adopt and do were often suggested to him by the descendants of the German-born fur merchant who had anchored in Hampton Roads towards the close of the eighteenth century, and whose achievements had been chronicled by Irving in the narrative condensed into the pre- ceding sentences. One is not therefore surprised that in one descended from such forefathers great wealth should be set off by good taste. More than a quarter of a century since a little hotel 322 MR. W. W. AS TOR in Cork Street, Piccadilly, was a favourite resort of intelligent, well-to-do and educated Americans, pre- ferring its quietness to the larger Langham. A partly Gallicized American connected, it may be, with some Paris banking house, and known among his friends as Harry Stone, talked to many Englishmen for the first time about the traditional virtues and graces accompanying the wealth of the Astor family; he dwelt particularly on the refined splendour of life and during the Paris troubles of 1870-1 the seasonable good works of a prominent member of the house, then largely resident in Paris. Only within the last few years has Mr. Astor been an universally known citizen of London. Long before then he, as at an earlier date his ancestors, had been a personal force among Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic. Other and nearly contemporary American mani- festations have there been of refined and refining influences, not unlike those embodied in Mr. W. W. Astor. Than the late Samuel Ward, whose sobriquet as " Uncle of half the Anglo-Saxon race " has passed from the vernacular into the classic, few, in a light and irresponsible sort of way, did more to improve the social relations between the families of Bull and Jonathan. This soft-mannered, pleasant-voiced old gentleman, who can never have been young, was, 323 PERSONAL FORCES OF THE PERIOD according to English ideas, a well-educated man ; he was the earliest and most pleasant specimen of the human "tame cat" of the American genus English great houses have known. A polite and agreeable example which has been widely followed he could, and he did, set. The most polished specimen of the American man about town, now so firmly established among us, came in with Mr. Ward, his nephew Mr. Marion Crawford, and his friend the late Allen Thorndike Rice, during the sixties and seventies. But more weight of character and more solid endow- ments than fell to the lot of Mr. Ward were required to give the American colony in Great Britain the position in which it finds itself to-day. Whatever may have been the incidents in New York preceding the departure from it of the Astor nephew of an Astor uncle already established in high position in New York, the gain to the Americans on the Thames has been undoubted; for Mr. Astor has combined with the means the ability required to consolidate for his compatriots the social work which those before him may have begun. 324 INDEX Aberdeen, Lord and Lady, 300, 301 Adye, General, 129, 130 Aide, Hamilton, 275 Albert, Prince, 7, 63, 93 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 308 Arnold, Matthew, 9, 243 Ashbourne, Lord, 161, 169 Asqiiith, Mr., 103, 104 Astor, John Jacob, 319, 321 Astor, W. W., 318 Austin, Alfred, 8, 269-275 Balfour, A. J., 56, 69, 83-92 Balfour, Gerald, 83-92 Bancrofts, The, 287, 293 Barrett, Wilson, 287, 292 Barton, Dunbar, 169 Barttelot, Su- Walter, 85 Bateman, H. L., 288 Beaconsfield, Lord, 3, 5, 18, 25, 26, 32, 35, 36, 40, 68, 73, 74, 87, 88, 101, 104, 171, 202, 234, 289, 290, 304 Bellamy, Dr., 227 Benjamin, Judah P., 150, 151 Beresford, Lord and Lady Charles, 141-149 Bigge, Sir Arthur, 11, 12 Blachford, Lord, 108 Black, William, 264 Blanchard, E. L., 295 Blowitz, Chevalier de, 172, 203, 204 Borthwick, Peter, 184, 185 Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 187 Boyd, Dr., 229 Brackenbury, Henry, 139 Bright, John, 25, 107 Broadbent, Sir William, 235 Brodrick, G. C, 196 Browning, Oscar, 232 Browning, Robert, 256 Bruce, Rev. Dr., 221 Bulwer Lytton, 20 Burne- Jones, Sir E., 276-283 Butler, William, 137, 138 Bywater, Professor, 229 Caird, Dr. Edward, 225-227 Caird, Dr. John, 226 Calcraft, Sir Henry, 201, 202, 303 Calverley, C. S., 46 Cambridge, Duke of, 9 Campbell, Rev. R. J., 223 Chamberlain, Joseph, 44, 69-82, 143, 144 Chamberlayne, Tankerville, 76 Chaplin, Henry, 36 Chenery, Thomas, 199, 200 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 30, 90, 141, 162-164, 200, 212, 315 Clark, Sir Andrew, 235 Clarke, Sir Edward, 155 Clifford, Rev. Dr., 223 Cockburn, Sir Alexander, 153, 154, 157 Connaught, Duke of, 9 Cook, Dutton, 295, 296 Cook, John Douglas, 23, 97 Corelli, Marie, 266, 267 Courtney, Leonard, 96 Cranbrook, Lord, 165 Creighton, Bishop, 211, 212 • 25 mDEX Crewe, Mrs., 40 Cross, Lord, 168 Currie, Sir Philip and Lady, 116- 127 Dale, A. W,, 224 Dale, R. W., 221, 223, 224 Davidson, Strachan, 229 Davison, J. W., 200 Delane, J. T., 95, 96, 198 Derby, the fourteenth Lord, 78 Devonshire, Duke and Duchess of, 34-50, 61 Dickens, Charles, 194, 255 Dilke, Ashton, 80 Dilke, Sir Charles, 69-82, 143 Disraeli. See Beaconsfield. Dobson, Austin, 274 Dufferin, Lord, 120, 121 Eliot, George, 261, 262, 285 EUicott, Bishop, 220 Fairbairn, Dr., 222 Fane, Violet, 266 Faraday, Michael, 7 Farjeon, B. L., 252 Frere, J. Hookham, 78, 246 Froude, J. A., 31, 87 Gardiner, S. K, 210 Gibson, Edward. See Ashbourne. Gladstone, W. E., 38, 71, 101, 300, 301 Glenesk, Lord, 183-191 Gore, Canon, 213-218 Gorst, Sir John, 162, 164 Grant, James, 184 Grant Duff, Sir Mountstuart, 90, 91, 192, 241, 242, 244 Gregory, Sir William, 142 Grey, Lord, 3 Gronow, Rees Howell, 138, 139 Grundy, Sydney, 294 Gull, Sir Wm., 234, 235 Hamber, Thomas, 21, 22 Hamilton, Sir Edwanl, 109 Hamley, Sir George, 129 Hammond, Lord, 119 Harcourt, Sir William, 24, 51, 93- 105 Hay, Colonel John, 60 Hayter, Sir Arthur and Lady, 297- 299 Hayward, Abraham, 205, 206 Henlev, W. E., 268, 274, 275 Herbert, Sir Robert, 108, 118 Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael and Lady, 181, 301, 303 Hood, Thomas, 75 Hood, Tom, 76 Hope, Beresford, 23, 97 Hope, Thomas, 298, 299 Horton, Rev. Dr., 223 Houghton, Lord, 1 Irving, Sir Henry, 202, 284-293 Irving, Washington, 319, 321 Jackson, Dr., 228 Jebb, Professor, 231, 232 Jennings, Louis T., 194, 195 Jeune, Sir F. H., 159 Johnstone, James, 21, 22 Jones, H. A., 294 Jowett, Benjamin, 70, 216, 225, 227, 280 Kebbel, T. E., 307 Keble, Rev. John, 4 Kelvin, Lord, 8 Kennion, Bishop, 211 Kingsley, Henry, 253 Kipling, Rudyard, 275 Knight, Joseph, 295 KnoUys, Sir Francis, 12-14, 15 Knollys, Sir William, 13 Knutsford, Lord, 91 Labouchere, Mr., 50, 189-191 Lang, Andrew, 309 Lawson, Sir Edward, 189 Lefroy, Dean, 220 Leighton, Lord, 276-278, 282 Leslie, G. D., 277 Lewes, G. H., 285, 286 Lister, Lord, 8 Lubbock, Sir John, 242-250 Lyons, Lord, 124 2G INDEX Lytton, Bulwer, 261, 290 Macaulay, Lord, 79 Mackenzie, Morell, 235, 287 Mackintosh, Sir James, 185 Macready, W. C, 287 Maguire, Rochefort, 313 Magrath, Dr., 228 Mahaffy, Professor, 232 Mahonv, Frank, 186 Maine,"'Sir Henry S., 96, 97 Mallock, W. H., 258 Martin, Sir Theodore, 7, 11, 93 Meade, Sir Robert, 108, 109, 120 Melbourne, Lord, 4, 6, 44 Melville, Whyte, 116 Meredith, George, 254-267 Meyer, Rev. F. B., 223 Mill, J. S., 267 Millais, Sir J. E., 277, 278 Morier, Sir R., 117 Morley, John, 24, 97 Morris, William, 279, 280 Mowbray, Sir John, 83, 84 Mudford, W. H., 307 Murray, Grenville, 188, 194 Newdegate, Mr., 74, 75 Newman, Cardinal, 81, 107 Northcote, Sii' Stafford, 30, 31, 107, 165 Oliphant, Laurence, 187, 204 Orchard.son, W. Q., 277 Oxenford, John, 200, 295 Paget, Dean, 229 Palmerston, Lord, 41, 88, 245 Parker, Rev. Dr., 222 Pauncefote, Sir Julian, 118 Payn, James, 265, 266 Peacock, T. L., 258, 259 Pelham, Professor, 229 Peploe, Rev. Webb, 220 Pinero, A. W., 294 Plunket, David (Lord Rathmore), 161, 166, 167 Poe, E. A., 322 Powell, Sir Douglas, 236 Poynter, Sir E. J., 283 Qiiain, Dr., 238 Quin, Dr., 238 Rathmore, Lord. See Plunket. Reaile, Charles, 294, 314 Reeve, Henry, 198, 199 Reid, Sir Robert, 104 Rhodes, Cecil, 312-317 Rhodes, Frank, 312 Roberts, Lord, 128, 133-137 Robertson, T. W., 293 Rogers, Dr. Guinness, 222 Rosebery, Lord, 51-68, 171 Rothschild, The First Lord, 80 Rothschild, Mr. Alfred de, 174 Rothschild, Baron Ferdinand de, 141 Rothschild, Mr. Ferdinand de, 175 Rothschild, Mr. Leopold de, 173, 174 Rothschild, Baron Lionel de, 172, 173 Russell, Sir W. H., 100 Russell of Killowen, Lord, 150-160 Ryle, Bishop, 219 Sala, George Augustus, 184 Salisbury, Lord, 17-33, m, 94 Sandars, T. C, 97 Sardou, 81 Schreiner, Olive, 297 Scott, Clement, 295 Scott, Rev. William, 97 Sevvell, Dr., 227, 228 Sherbrooke, Lord, 29 Sidgwick, Arthur, 229, 230 Smalley, G. W., 202, 203 Spencer, Herbert, 247 Stanhopes, The, 301-303 Stephen, Sir Fitzjames, 97, 100 Stevenson, R. L., 265 Stone, Marcus, 277 Stubbs, Bishop, 207-212 Temple, Archbishop, 211 Tennyson, Lord, 8, 290, 291 Thackeray, W. M., 258, 259 Thomas, Rev. Arnold, 223 Thomas, W. Moy, 295 Thomson, Archbishop, 228 Traill, H. D., 191, 309 327 INDEX Trevelyan, Sir George, 95 Victoria, Queen, 1, 2, 5, 6, 64 Villiers, C, P., 233 Vogel, Sir Julius, 253, 254 Wace, Rev. Henry, 96 Waldegiave, Lady, 41 Wales, Prince of, 10, 14, 15, 64, 181 Walker, Rev. F., 230, 231 Wallace, Sir Mackenzie, 205 Ward, Samuel, 60, 323, 324 Warre, Dr., 115 Warren, Dr. Herbert, 229 Watts-Dunton, T., 275 Welby, Lord, 108-114 Weyman, Stanley, 266 Wharncliffe, Lord, 187 White, Sir William, 118 Wilks, Dr., 234 Wolff, Sir H. Drummond, 117 AVolseley, Lord and Lady, 9, 128- 140 Wood, Sir Evelyn, 137 Yates, Edmund, 158 York, Archbishop of, 211 THE END Richard Cluy S; Sons, Limited, London S[ Bungay.