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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE
Ann S. Farnam Fund

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PORTRAITS OF
THE EIGHTIES

Portraits of
the Sixties
By Justin McCarthy.
With Portrait Illustrations.
Portraits of
the Seventies
By the Rt. Hon. G. W. E.
Russell. With Portrait
Illustrations.Second Impression.
T. FISHER UN WIN, LTD., LONDON

{From a photograph by Elliott and Fry.)

PORTRAITS OF
THE EIGHTIES

By
HORACE G. HUTCHINSON

WITH 28 ILLUSTRATIONS

T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1920

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE
IT is curious, as one tries to bring into a picture
gallery some of the chief actors in the Eighties,
to find how naturally all the political portraits
fall into a regular sequence. All the first
half, and more, of the decade, up to 1886 and the
new Parliament of that year, is the story of Ireland
and of the Home Rule agitation. To be sure, there
were by-plays, wherein the scene shifted to Egypt,
with Arabi Pasha in a leading role, and later to
the national shame of Khartoum and the tragedy of
Gordon's death, but the main drama was domestic, in
so far as we may speak of Ireland as domesticated.
The leading actors are Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell.
Hero and villain, I presume most of the audience
will regard them, but much depends on the point of
view. Then, a little after the middle of the decade,
"Puff!" like the magician's blow on the wand,
comes the General Election. Like a single candle
out goes the Liberal Party ; in comes Lord Salisbury.
Now the originals of all that were on the scene before
the great extinguishing " Puff " seem to me, by com
parison, to be easy to realise. I can, at least, form
mental visions of them — much mistaken, it may be,
but fairly clear in outline. But when it comes to
Lord Salisbury ; no, I have not, in my mind's eye,
the slightest idea of the real man. Of course his
massive physical outlines and certain surface manners
were strikingly plain, but they count for very little.

vi PREFACE
And as for the lines and hues which do count in the
presentment of the real inner man, I never gleaned
any conception of them either from the very little that
I saw of him, or from the very much that I heard
of him. I knew one of his private secretaries rather
intimately, yet I never extracted any information
from him about the real man who was his chief. I do
not think it was there to extract. He knew nothing
of him, as it seemed to me, although he reverenced
him deeply — and he was not a young man much given
over to reverence.
Mercifully it does not fall on me to attempt a por
trait of Lord Salisbury. I should refuse the attempt
if it did. He is the most perfect enigma to me of all
the statesmen, though I share very much of that pri
vate secretary's reverence for his great work and his
great personality. I admit, however, that I do not
know what manner of man it is that I reverence in
him. But Mr. George Russell has done his outlines
in the " Portraits of the Seventies." They are
strictly outlines, however, as I deem, and nowhere
inner lines in any sense. Some of his portraits that
practised but alas ! dead hand has done most vividly.
I cannot, however, think that he has made the real
Lord Salisbury live. Some of the portraits that he
drew I have been obliged to try to retouch, because
of the active role that the originals played in the
Eighties ; but so far as possible I have not ventured
to meddle with what he has done so well. I need
not say that I expect no unanimity in my readers
about the fidelity of the likenesses. Our chief interest
in discussing character arises from our differing views
and estimates. Least of all do I anticipate ready
acceptance of the key which I have ventured to put
forward to the secret of the strange, the repellent, yet
the extraordinarily interesting character of Parnell.

PREFACE vii
I will say no more than this : that if mine is not indeed
the right key, it is at least the only one which I have
heard of which fits the hard lock at all. Even Mr.
O'Brien, Parnell 's own familiar friend, in his most
able and sympathetic biography, offers no solution,
no theory of the inner motives of this cold and aloof
personality. He does but leave us wondering.
To return to that sequence of events and actors
strung on the thread of Irish interests through all
the first part of the Eighties. There was, of course,
Mr. Gladstone, the great leader, with his henchmen,
Morley, Harcourt, Hartington, Chamberlain, and so
on, the first two to remain faithful to the end, the
others, with many more, to fall away. Then, in
opposition, Lord Salisbury, with Lord Randolph
Churchill most persistent in the Commons, Mr. A. J.
Balfour, and the rest. Most of these Mr. Justin
McCarthy, in his Portraits of the Sixties, has given
us; or, if not he, then Mr. G. W. E. Russell in
his gallery of the Seventies. Both writers travel
outside their respective briefs too, and gossip of the
Eighties, beyond their borders. Therefore much
of what I might have said I do not say, to avoid
repetition of what has been better said already. For
the rest, I have tried to fill in, where there were vacant
places, some of the old portraits, besides drawing
those original actors in the drama of the Eighties
whom they have not touched.
I am rather painfully conscious that I have not
done any justice at all to the ladies who were active
in the period. Those were days when we first began
to hear the cry of " Votes for Women " which was
to swell to such a volume until the measure for which
it was clamant was granted, almost as if part of the
peace following the Great War. It was a concession
which could scarcely be withheld from them in reward

viii PREFACE
for the amazing service which our British women
rendered in that awful struggle. But such a thing
as " militant suffragism " was unknown in the peace
ful years of the Eighties, when Mrs. Fawcett was
perhaps the chief and most able figure in the ranks
of women demanding, by all constitutional means,
the vote. One at least of the most powerful of her
adjutants lives to celebrate the triumph which Mrs.
Fawcett was not spared to share — Lady Frances
Balfour. She was indeed most militant, though
never coming into open conflict with the police.
Well do I remember, in the Eighties, or a little later,
attending a meeting at which she gallantly declared,
" I hope not to die — L was almost saying that I do
not intend to die — until women get the vote." It
is an intention triumphantly fulfilled, for happily
she lives to fight many another day yet, and to witness
and enjoy the spectacle of women voting, to achieve
which she gave very much of her time and of her
uncommon ability. She may witness also, I am not
so sure with what measure of enjoyment, the spectacle
of women standing for Parliament, and of one
actually seated.
The lady whose name was a " household word,"
as is said, in all the British Empire, and was never
mentioned without a silent blessing, Florence Night
ingale, was still living, as indeed she lived for another
score of years further, through all this period, but the
work that had made her name was done. She lived,
in a semi-regal seclusion, in her house at 10, South
Street, just off Park Lane, a seclusion imposed on
her by the indifferent health which she had broken
in her strenuous Crimean hardships and labours ; but
still she followed political and social movements with
much vivid interest. Greatly favoured persons were
summoned, almost as by royal command, to call on

PREFACE ix
her, and many in high places sought her counsel.
The healthy breath of contradiction never fell upon
her, and for lack of its corrective influence there is
little doubt that she began to look on her own judg
ment as infallible. A high official in the India Office
told me that he had been summoned to " talk over
Indian matters with her," as the summons said.
The talk, which lasted an hour, was entirely on Miss
Nightingale's part, although its first five minutes
demonstrated her nearly complete ignorance of the
subject. But no woman in all history has deserved
better of her country. Another lady who was still
active in her many good works at that time was the
Baroness Burdett Coutts.
Death, the Reaper, was very busy with his scythe
at the beginning of the Eighties, and culled some very
choice sheaves. George Eliot died at the very opening
of 1880; Carlyle early in 1881. There followed
Froude's biography of the Sage of Chelsea which
raised so great a storm. The very duty of a bio
grapher became in question. Virtually the question
resolved itself into very simple form : " Is it the
biographer's duty to show us the man as he really is,
or the man as he ought to have been and as we ima
gined that he was ? " Froude had tacitly answered
the question, as it addressed itself to him, by writing
the biography with the former aim in view. The
public was shocked, who had believed in Carlyle as a
strong heroic soul, mentally suffering in philosophical
silence for the sins of the world. Froude presented
us with the picture of a poor mortal thing incessantly
complaining of its dyspepsia. The public had
figured Carlyle as possessed of all the virtues that he
commended to it and that he castigated it for not
possessing. It might have been grateful for a revela
tion that this was a poor fellow-being of like weak-

x PREFACE
nesses with its own, only seeing into the core of those
weaknesses perhaps a little more clearly, and having
at command the most searching rhetoric for their
condemnation. But as for the really right answer
to the biographer's problem, it is surely this : " Give
us the truth, so far as it is in you, about the man you
describe to us ; or, if you cannot do this without
offence, throw up your brief, quit telling the story."
There is no right middle course.
1 88 1 saw the death of Disraeli, most strangely
gifted genius and especially strange figure to lead the
country squires of England. In the same year died
Arthur Stanley, the greatly loved Dean of West
minster ; James Spedding, the literary critic (with
the " dome," as Edward Fitzgerald used disrespectr
fully to describe his naturally high forehead, still
loftier elevated by his baldness). George Borrow,
too, ceased his gipsyings in this year, a man who
came from that East Anglia which Fitzgerald fre
quented, though a little more northerly than Fitz
gerald. They should have met, for they would have
had much in common : much, too, in violent anti
pathy, for while Borrow was an inveterate fraterniser
with all and sundry, " Old Fitz " must have been
as prickly and inaccessible as a solitary and mis
anthropical hedgehog. But I cannot recall any hint
of such meeting from the writings of either — not
even as given in those best of English letters of Fitz
gerald's, in which such an encounter would scarcely
have escaped record.
The work of all these and several more of note,
whom death took in the first two years of the decade,
was already done : they were not really of the
Eighties, though their lives stretched into the period.
I believe I should say a word of defence, apology,
excuse, or what you will, for the use of the term

PREFACE xi
" decade." Purists, I understand, object to it,
as a " coined " word, a word with no legitimate
ancestry or derivation. So be it. I accept it as a
coined word. The objectors may object and be happy.
It is too convenient for my present purpose to be
discarded in deference to their objection. Nor do
I entirely realise what bar sinister they can find in
the derivation from the Greek word for the numeral
" ten." One caution I must give to prevent misapprehen
sion : I have not portioned numbers of words and
pages in exact correspondence with the importance
of the persons whom the words and pages were meant
to portray. Of some, who have done the greater
work, there yet seemed less to say — less detail, that
would not be tiresome, to put into the picture — than
about others whose labour has been of less worth to
the world. Moreover it is the greater ones of whom
more has been written already, and I have tried to
avoid re-telling a known tale.

CONTENTS

CaSPTER PAGE
I. G. W. E. RUSSELL .... I
II. W. E. GLADSTONE ... 5
III. LORD HARTINGTON (LATER DUKE OF
DEVONSHIRE) . . . -17
IV. CHARLES STEWART PARNELL . . 2 J
V. JOHN BRIGHT . . . . -45
VI. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN .... 54
VII. SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT . . 63
VIII. THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON. . 73
IX. GENERAL GORDON .... 89
X. LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS . 102
XI. ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE, ARCHDEACON FARRAR,
AND SOME OTHER CHURCHMEN . Ill
xii. professor huxley and the evolu
tionists . . . . .121
xiii. sir john lubbock (later lord avebury) i 33
xiv. sir thomas brassey (later earl
brassey)  145
xv. lord elcho and *lord wemyss . . 157
xiii

XIV

CONTENTS

XVI.
XVII.
XVIII. XIX. XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII. XXIV.
INDEX

WILLIAM MORRIS ....
SWINBURNE AND GEORGE MEREDITH .
SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
G. F. WATTS, J. E. MILLAIS, AND E. BURNE-
JONES ....
NELLIE FARREN AND SOME OTHER
PLAYERS ....
W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
THE " AESTHETES " AND OSCAR WILDE
W. G. GRACE ....
THE "SOULS " .

PAGE
174188
201
218236254
272279
287299

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

G. W. E. RUSSELL 

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

W. E. GLADSTONE 

6

LORD HARTINGTON (DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE) IN THE

HOUSE . 

. 18

C S. PARNELL 

28

JOHN BRIGHT . 

46

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN 

54
SIR W. V. HARCOURT . ....
64
HENRY LABOUCHERE 
74
CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
82
GENERAL GORDON 
90
LORD CROMER 
96
LORD ROBERTS 
108
DR. TEMPLE 
112
DR. BENSON 
118
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY ....
122
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK (LORD AVEBURY) .
134
LORD BRASSEY 
146
LORD WEMYSS 
158
WILLIAM MORRIS 
• 174
GEORGE MEREDITH 
194
SIR SPENCER WALPOLE ....
202
ANDREW LANG 
208
G. F. WATTS IN HIS STUDIO
218
SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, R.A.
. 224
SIR E. BURNE-JONES 
. 228
SIR W. S. GILBERT 
¦ 254
OSCAR WILDE 
. 276
DR. W. G. GRACE 
. 280
XV
PORTRAITS OF THE
EIGHTIES

CHAPTER I
G. W. E. RUSSELL
TRIBUTE is due in the first instance to the
memory of George Russell, author of those
Portraits of the Seventies to which this is
the intended sequel. George Russell knew
everybody, and everybody knew George Russell.
There never was a man better equipped to be the
gossip of his day and to draw pen-portraits of the
people prominent in his time. He might well have
done the Eighties also, in which case the portraits
in this volume would have been much bettered by
his master hand, for he died only the other day, as
I write in 19 19. Portraits of the Sixties would have
been a little too early for him, even had not Mr.
Justin McCarthy gone ahead of him with them, for
he was born only in the middle Fifties.
I think that it was quite a surprise to most people
who did not already know his age, and were informed,
to learn that he was comparatively so young at his
death. For years his health had not been good, and
he had the weighty figure and walk of a man far
older than he was. He looked quite the part of
the "heavy father" on the stage. He always ap
peared to regard himself, moreover, as old enough
1

2 G. W. E. RUSSELL
to be his own father, for he had the ways of one
twenty years older. Men who were his senior by
fully that span have told me that he always ad
dressed them just as if he were their contemporary.
More than that, his venerable aspect so impressed
people of his own age that they were disposed to pay
him the regard due to one a score of years older.
He began to wear this air of dignity at the beginning
of middle age, or even earlier.
His mind did not age in like measure, and kept a
youth that contradicted his physical look. It was
never a very original mind nor a very forceful mind ;
but it had remarkable gifts of storing information
and of giving it pleasantly forth. He made a con
siderable success in life, but it is certain that he
disappointed the high political hopes that had been
formed of him. The heads of his Parliamentary
record run as follows : Entry into the House in
1880, where he sat, as Member for Aylesbury, till
1885. Then, following Mr. Gladstone's fortunes, he
was out of Parliament till 1892, when he came back
as Member for North Bedfordshire. He was Parlia
mentary Secretary to the Local Government Board
from 1883 to 1885, Under-Secretary for India from
1892 to 1894, and Under-Secretary for the Home
Department from 1894 to 1895. He was made a
Privy Councillor in 1907. Thus he went far, but,
with his fine natural abilities and his heritage as a
scion of the great Whig family, more might have
been, and more was, expected of him.
George Russell, however, had a place of his own in
the world distinct from any that political honours
could confer. He was a ready and agreeable writer,
as his Portraits of the Seventies, even if that volume
stood alone, would testify. And it stands only as one
in a goodly company of books rather similar to it,
from his pen. Moreover he was a great conversa-

A GREAT LAY CHURCHMAN 3
tionalist in a certain sense ; that is to say, that he
was a very agreeable and well-informed talker on a
wide variety of subjects. He knew men and manners.
He had a fine memory, and I expect that he must have
kept full and well-indexed note-books. He was not
a witty or an original talker, but he had a great store
of stories in his mind, and he told them well. Pos
sibly he told rather too many, giving his enemies
opportunity to quote, in connection with him, the
ingenious word " anecdotage " which they would
not have had the wit to invent. As a matter of
fact his talk never fell into any kind of dotage, but
it might perhaps, without offence, be called anecdotal.
Enough is said to account for that " place of his
own " which I have claimed for George Russell,
but the principal ground on which it rested remains
still to be named : he was a great lay Churchman.
Most laymen in high position, however deep their
interest be in Church matters, are too busy in mun
dane ways to give the Church much active help.
That is true to-day, and it was yet more true in the
Eighties. A layman zealous for the Church and
willing and anxious to lavish time and work and
thought on her service was a rarity, and one who
combined with this zeal the comparative leisure of
George Russell, save for the few years that he was
in Parliament and in office, was hardly to be found.
His support was of greatest value to the Church, just
because he was a layman. The high ecclesiastics
naturally welcomed him into their councils, and he
loved to assist in them. He loved, too, to take part
in the services of the Church, and almost the last
time that I saw him was on the occasion of his reading
the lessons, which he always did most beautifully,
at the Sunday morning service in St. Peter's, Eaton
Square. Does it not become obvious how large his acquaint-

4 G. W. E. RUSSELL
ance must have been ? He was educated at Harrow
and at Oxford. His natural place was in the " great
world " of society and politics as one of the famous
Russell family ; his gifts were just those which would
make him welcome there ; all the leading Church
men were his friends, because he was the zealous
friend of the Church ; he wrote voluminously, so
all the literary circles were open to him ; he even
plied the busy pen of the journalist, and until nearly
the end of his life he wrote the London letter for the
Manchester Guardian.
So he was known, and I think that he liked being
known. He used to drive about London in a carriage
picked out in colours which did not suggest that he
sought seclusion or would feel offence if people should
say, as he passed : " That's George Russell." It
would have pleased him, probably, to be so noticed,
and so noticed, and pleased, he was. In a word he
was one of the most sociable of men, interested in his
fellow-kind and pleased that they should take an
interest in him. It was a disposition as far as possible
remote from that of the recluse and the misanthrope,
and it qualified him remarkably well to be the por-
trayer of eminent men and women of his time.

CHAPTER II
W. E. GLADSTONE
THE decade of the Eighties was a period
of political stir in England, and it was
very largely dominated by the extra
ordinary and masterful figure of Mr.
Gladstone. That is a statement which may be made
equally without fear of contradiction as without
avowal of Party bias, for it needs only to look at the
record of those years to read that during the first
half and more he was Premier and also leader of the
House of Commons. Presumably it is of advantage
to the Government and to the country that the Prime
Minister should lead in the Lower House, but it is
an advantage which did not favour Mr. Gladstone's
successor. Lord Salisbury followed him as Prime
Minister, and of necessity sat in the Upper House,
with, at first, Sir M. Hicks Beach, next Lord Randolph
Churchill, and then Mr. W. H. Smith, leading the
Commons. The result of the Election which brought Mr.
Gladstone into power at the beginning of the Eighties
came as a surprise to all the prophets. If they had
anticipated a Liberal majority at all, it is certain that
none nearly so large had been predicted by the ac
credited judges of the passing event. The Liberals
had not been in office for many years, and the long
interval made Mr. Gladstone's task in forming his
Cabinet peculiarly difficult.
Happily it is not my task to relate the political
5

6 W. E. GLADSTONE
story of those years, nor is it my part to put a hand
to an attempt so venturesome as the sketch of a full-
length portrait of the actors who figured in it most
largely. Their portraits, at length, have been limned
by many deft masters, and notably by Mr. Justin
McCarthy in his Portraits of the Sixties, and by Mr.
G. W. E. Russell, who took up his parable with Por
traits of the Seventies. Thus, Gladstone, Hartington,
Salisbury, and others of the great ones have already
had indifferent justice done to the lineaments of their
characters. To tell truth, these predecessors of mine,
McCarthy and Russell, did not stick any too strictly by
their text. They travelled gaily outside their de
cades, transgressing their self -set boundaries with a
laxity that was almost immoral. And of course
political life and energies are commonly prolonged to
far more than a ten years ' measure. The men who were
active in the Sixties may be found still active, and
perhaps reinforced with an added wisdom and matu
rity, in the Eighties. They may be the same men,
playing different parts, in the one scene as in the
other, or it may happen again that they are essentially
different men, with an outlook, a judgment, and almost
a character profoundly changed. Nor are those
characters the most generally interesting which are
the most self-consistent. Growth is change, and
growth is the law of life : the man therefore who does
not change is, so far, dead. As living man, and so
" the noblest study of mankind," it no longer amuses
us to consider him.
The whole history of Mr. Gladstone's career and
administration has been written, as everybody knows
and as everybody ought to have read, by his friend
and follower who is now Lord Morley. Lord Morley's
high literary abilities and political sympathies, as
well as his personal attachment, marked him as a
right man for the great task, and by general consent

W. E. GLADSTONE.

HIS " HUMANITY " 7
he has more than justified his selection ; but it is to be
regretted that he was so little in real touch with the
earnest religious faith and principles which meant
so very much to Mr. Gladstone. Lord Morley's
own agnosticism, if I do him no wrong in attaching
to him this label of rather negative description, of
necessity shut off all sympathy with that side of the
nature of his great subject ; and his own engrossment
with politics inclined him perhaps to find in them an
even more exclusive interest for Mr. Gladstone than
they really had. He gives us a splendid picture of
Mr. Gladstone the statesman : we get from him
scarcely a glimpse of Mr. Gladstone as the human
being. And quite human he was, even in a family
circle which would almost insist in regarding him as
super-human. I regret that my personal knowledge
of him was next to nothing, but of and about him
I used to hear a great deal from various relations.
No man, I imagine, ever has inspired quite equal
veneration in his own household. A little farther from
the actual centre and source of this worship — that is
to say, among nephews and nieces — an occasional
breath of something which bordered upon criticism
might be permitted to intrude, but still only in the
hushed and rather awe-struck whisper in which it
used to be deemed proper, in Victorian days, to speak
of the Deity. Of course one of the greatest, perhaps
we are justified in saying the very greatest, event
of our domestic politics which happened in the
Eighties was Mr. Gladstone's announcement, which
fell like a thunderbolt on those who were outside
the circle that knew of its coming and in which it
was actually prepared, of his conversion to a Home
Rule Government for Ireland. It had an explosive
force which blew the Liberal Party into two distinct
halves, of which one, coalescing with the more pro
gressive of the Conservatives, became a new Party

8 W. E. GLADSTONE
with a new name, the " Unionists," while the other,
with Mr. Gladstone at its head, stood for Home Rule
as it was defined in the Bill of '86. The issues cannot
be forgotten : the rejection of the Bill by a sufficient
majority in the House, the resignation of the Govern
ment, and the eventual return to office of the Unionists
by a large majority of the electors' votes.
Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, the famous cricketer, after
wards Colonial Secretary and perhaps the most
popular man of his generation, differed from the policy
of Mr. Gladstone, who was his uncle. I believe he
had " devilled " in his younger days for Henry James,
the great lawyer ; at all events they had been closely
associated. Henry James, then Attorney-General
and one of Gladstone's most trusted henchmen before
the delivery of the thunderbolt, had conceived it his
duty to part company with his illustrious captain.
It may have been in some measure due to his influence
and example that Alfred Lyttelton went the same
way. Nothing remarkable in that we may say ! It has
happened to all of us, we may suppose, to have uncles
from whom in our youth we differed in opinion, and
followed courses which were not their course. Like
wise, in later life, there are few to whom it has not
occurred to have nephews — and nieces, no less —
and to find them, too, conducting themselves in a
manner which does not appear to our ancient wisdom
to be all that is to be wished.
But then, in neither case was the uncle Mr.
Gladstone ! That is the difference. The secession
of his nephew Alfred from the faithful of his train
over this highly debatable question of Home Rule
was looked on in the more immediate family circle
as nothing less than a tragedy. Nay, worse : it
was regarded as a crime, and a crime of the most
heinous kind, approaching the deadly sin of sacrilege.

THE VENERATION INSPIRED BY HIM 9
It is difficult to hear, or to read, without a smile, of
the terrible solemnity, the fear of the awful conse
quences, with which the breaking of the shocking
news to Mr. Gladstone was contemplated. Alfred
had to travel down to Hawarden in person, probably
at some considerable inconvenience, to do it. We
are given to understand an awed hush pervading the
house so soon as he had entered it upon his terrific
errand, rather as if some criminal condemned to
immediate execution had crossed the threshold.
Breaths were tensely held when he went into the
study, as though to his last confessional. One gathers
that there was a certain subconscious surprise in
all the household that the world, to all appearance,
had changed so little, that no catastrophic stroke
had fallen, when he came out from the avuncular
presence after unbosoming himself of his guilt.
There is an extraordinarily unreal atmosphere about
it all. It is hardly as if it were a mere matter of
statement of opinion, and of a course of action to
be pursued, between two human beings both of mature
years, although of course one much older and more
experienced than the other. We cannot imagine
that any such tragic emotion could have been kindled
in the Cecil or the Cavendish family by the diversion
of a nephew from the uncle's line in politics. Surely
it is remarkable, and a high testimony to the splendid
balance of Mr. Gladstone's great mental qualities,
that, living in an atmosphere of adulation such as
all this implies, elevated to an altitude in the estima
tion of those most near to him that clearly was above
that of the natural human being, he should still have
kept his clarity of judgment and a reasonable estimate
of his own powers and character.
Mrs. Gladstone, it is true, in spite of the almost
motherly care with which she guarded her illustrious
husband, was able to take at times a view which

10 W. E. GLADSTONE
I think would have been deemed quite impious on
the part of any other member of the family. " Wil
liam would be a great bore, if he were not a genius,"
is a saying recorded of her which testifies to her
shrewd insight. She had indeed an uncommon
dower of profound and sympathetic wisdom which
was not always credited to her on account of the
perfect simplicity which veiled it. Her gift of
humorous tact was never turned to better account
than when she met, unexpectedly, one of Mr. Glad
stone's most trusted followers who had just deserted
him in his Home Rule campaign. She held up a
rebuking finger, saying, " Naughty ! Naughty ! "
and inevitably the laugh cleared all the electricity
from the air.
I do not think that the warmth of Mr. Gladstone's
affection for his greatly erring nephew was seriously
diminished by his truancy ; and that is a testimony
the more valuable to the goodness of his heart and
his depth of feeling, because it is tolerably certain
that this Irish Bill meant far more to him at
the moment than any other of the great measures
which he succeeded in writing on the Statute Book
from time to time during his long career. I remember
the then Lord Southesk, father of the present bearer
of the title, telling me that he met Mr. Gladstone in
the Parliament Yard, soon after he had made his great
speech on the Bill. Lord Southesk had listened
to it with the greatest attention and admiration.
" A wonderful effort," he said it was, " for a man of
Mr. Gladstone's years, on the physical side, to say
nothing of its intellectual force." Naturally he
welcomed the chance of congratulating the speaker.
And then he told me that Mr. Gladstone raised his
eyes to heaven, with almost a rapt look in them, and
said earnestly : " Yes, I believe that God has designed
that I shall be the saviour of Ireland."

HIS EARNESTNESS OF PURPOSE u
He did not foresee the long and stony road which
that unfortunate island is still travelling in search
of its salvation. Yet he spoke in pious faith, and it
is not for us, even now, to say that he spoke in self-
delusion. It was not his destiny that either that
Home Rule Bill, nor another which he attempted
later, should be added to the number of those measures
which I wrote of just now as placed by his hand on
the Statute Book ; but what his championship of
the Home Rule cause did was to bring the idea of its
possibility, as a piece of practical politics, to the minds
of Englishmen as it never had been brought before.
If the ultimate salvation of Ireland is to be ground out
of the Home Rule mill, it is quite sure that the machine
is less rapid in action than Mr. Gladstone imagined,
but his may yet prove in the end, for all we know,
to have been the master-milling hand, though it was
not his to give, as he expected, the final turn to the
wheel. The ultimate secret of Mr. Gladstone's success in
carrying through so very much of the vast business
to which he set himself was, I am quite sure, his
deadly earnestness. Of course, all his gifts of in
tellect, his grasp of the essential, his faculty for
detaching the incidental details and concentrating
on the core of the question, his marvellous memory,
his rare eloquence — all these are to be understood.
They always have been understood; they have been
attributed to him in a thousand " appreciations."
So, too, of his moral qualities, his high purpose, his
working for what he believed to be the good of hu
manity, regardless of his personal interest, his ac
countability to God for his acts, and his indifference
to the verdict of man — all these, too, are to be granted.
He was thus supremely gifted. But, even so, with
all this moral and intellectual wealth he would have
achieved only a tithe of what he did but for that

12 W. E. GLADSTONE
resistless driving force which his terrific earnestness
supplied to set all in vigorous and almost perpetual
motion. It was an earnestness unimpeded, unmolli-
fied by any of the unction, so valuable for the smooth
working of the mechanism of life as in many ways
it is, of humour. I do not think that Mr. Gladstone
possessed a scintilla of it. As his nephews would say,
" You can never quite tell how Uncle William is
going to take a joke. It isn't quite safe to make
one with him. It may just go to the right place
with him, but again, it mayn't ; and if it doesn't,
he lets you know it."
Generalisations are very dangerous things to hazard,
and it constantly happens that, having ventured on
some general statement, the immediate experience
of the next few hours brings to your notice an in
stance utterly refuting it, but I do believe that very
few instances can be cited in disproof of the general
statement that no man of affairs has really achieved
greatness, and carried through measures of the first
importance, who has been gifted with a sense of hu
mour at all keen and ready. The man who would
be taken seriously must take himself and his mission
very seriously first, and this is just the point of view
which the sense of humour will not permit. It is
continually at hand to suggest that, after all, " all
the world's a play," and a comedy at that, and all
the men and women, at the best, high-class comedy
actors. No such light view of life and its purpose ever
interfered between Mr. Gladstone and the work
which his hand found to do. Always, he did it
with his might. I do not think that we find anywhere,
in the many records of him, nor have heard in the
many tales about him in which most of us must have
taken part, a story of any joke, any humorous
hint even, of his own making or suggestion. I do

HIS KINDLINESS 13
remember indeed hearing of a joke, of the practical
nature, which he perpetrated, quite unintentionally
and unconsciously, at the expense of an unfortunate
footman in a house where he was dining. It hap
pened that the young fellow was the son of old tenants
on the Hawarden estate. Mr. Gladstone caught
sight of him, and recognised him as he went round
the table with the dishes. The next time that he
came to Mr. Gladstone it was with a dish of peas.
Mr. Gladstone, taking no notice of the proffered
vegetable, held out his hand, turning half round
in his chair, and said in the most kindly and
hearty tones of his deep voice : " How are you,
Henry ? Very glad to see you ; father and mother
well?" The poor fellow, in his agitation, having to dis
engage a right hand to shake that of the Prime
Minister extended to him, very naturally poured
most of the peas in an avalanche over the head of the
next sitter at table, after which, Mr. Gladstone,
unconscious or uncaring that he had done anything
at all unusual, turned in his chair to his dinner again
and took up his knife and fork and the threads of the
general conversation just where he had laid them
down. History, so far as I know, does not record
the words of the lady on whose head the pea-hail
storm descended, nor what the butler said, in repri
mand to the footman, afterwards. But I do not think
that that subaltern would have been much concerned
at his superior officer's rebuke. He had been hon
oured so very highly that the most acrid censure of
the most majestic butler would merely glide off him
without doing him scathe. It is a story that illus
trates delightfully Mr. Gladstone's impulse to a
simple and natural act of kindness. He just did the
thing which his warm heart prompted without
thinking of such incidental circumstances as other

14 W. E. GLADSTONE
people's opinion of the act, or the destination of a
dish of peas.
I need scarcely say that in these trifling reflections
and details which I have here set down about this
very great man I do not imagine that I am presenting
anything approaching to a portrait of him. That
was not my intention. He has been already sketched
at full length again and again by many a limner
many times more practised and expert. His greater
qualities and his splendid services are common
knowledge. I may perhaps add one testimony,
rather striking, to his eloquence, by a witty French
man, and one who certainly had formed no precon
ceived notion in his favour. It was in the days,
towards the end of the Eighties, if I remember right,
when Mr. Gladstone first began to visit Biarritz.
He used to delight in watching the giant waves of
the Biscayan coast dash on that rock-bound shore —
possibly the finest exhibition of ocean's fury and
glory that the world has to show. This Frenchman,
since deceased, had formed his opinion of the Liberal
Prime Minister mainly from the conversation that
he had overheard, or had taken part in, at the British
Club, where used to gather a society of English
visitors and residents who were for the most part of
the class whose members take pride in describing
themselves as " Conservatives and Sportsmen " —
in other words, pleasant English gentlemen, of the
Eton and Oxford type of education, who had never
vexed the brain with great efforts of thought. The
day of Mr. Gladstone's arrival happened nearly to
coincide with that of the departure of one of the most
prominent of the annual visitors to Biarritz at that
time, Mr. Everard (since made Sir Everard, K.C.V.O.)
Hambro, the English banker and financier. The
Frenchman aforesaid, on the day of Mr. Gladstone's
coming, and with his opinions formed by what he had

A FRENCHMAN'S TRIBUTE 15
overheard of the English talk, observed that " II y a
trois malheurs de Biarritz, le depart de M. Hambro,
l'arrivee de M. Gladstone, et le chapeau de Miss  ."
Charity requires that a blank shall be recorded for
the name of the English lady whose headgear so
poignantly offended the delicate aesthetic sense of
the Gaul.
I do not know that anything ever happened to
modify his vexation of spirit over the last of these
misfortunes of his native town, but in respect of the
second : " l'arrivee de M. Gladstone," it was but a day
or two later that I found him in a very changed and
chastened mood. In the interval Mr. Gladstone
had made a speech — I think at some luncheon or like
function at which he had been entertained. He had
spoken in French, although he was not at all fluent
in that language. My friend, the Frenchman of
" les trois malheurs," had been one of his audience : he
could not say enough in praise either of the speaker
or of his speech. And this is how he put it : " He "
(that is Mr. Gladstone) " could not speak French
— no. But if he had thought over each sentence for
a year, he could not have found better things to say."
That, as it strikes me, is a wonderful testimony.
A man who had the natural gift of oratory, as Mr.
Gladstone possessed it, could turn it to such admirable
account as this, even under the difficulties imposed
by a language in which he had very little ease of
speech !
A great many people remarked, in Biarritz, a fact
about Mr. Gladstone's appearance which was so
familiar to us in England that we had ceased to
remark on it, that although he was, in actual stature,
quite a small man, yet he never gave you the impres
sion of smallness : you could not associate him with
any measure below the average. This was, surely,
because of the large capacity of the head ; and more

1 6 W. E. GLADSTONE
particularly, because of the eagle-like glance of his
widely open eyes. As the head was large and striking
in comparison with the whole figure, so the eyes
were disproportionately large and effective in com
parison with the whole face, and thus the total
expression became one of force and massiveness
rather than of anything on the small scale. It was
very singular.
Mr. Gladstone's attitude towards Ireland occupied
so much of the political stage in the middle Eighties
that it is difficult to get away from that drama and
from its actors. It is most natural to speak of those
Liberals who did not follow him as seceders, but it
has always to be remembered that it was really Mr.
Gladstone himself who seceded, who departed from
the recognised line. It was those others who were
steadfast in the path which they had set out to travel
under his guidance. It is but one testimony the
more to his masterful dominance that we find it so
easy to speak of them as the deflectors, the truants.
The truth is, that, for many of them, Gladstone, the
man, the leader, had come to stand almost in the place
of principle. He was their principle, and when they
abandoned him they all had a secret sense of guilt,
as though they were being false to their convictions.
Scarcely ever, in the whole course of history, has a
leader conducted his followers into a dilemma of
such difficulty. And the difficulty of the dilemma is
really a measure and an acknowledgment of the
extraordinary supremacy of the chief who led them
within its jaws.

CHAPTER III
LORD HARTINGTON ( LATER, DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE)
IT is a curious and significant thing, that when
Mr. Gladstone, in 1886, began to formulate
his new attitude towards Home Rule, there
was much speculation as to what this, that,
or the other of his followers might do, but there was
never any question at all about the position that Lord
Hartington would take up. Mr. Chamberlain men
were doubtful of. Sir Henry James, late Attorney-
General, who almost certainly might have been Lord
Chancellor had he continued faithful in the train of
the great Liberal chief, was not expected to be a
deserter ; but he sacrificed in some measure his
career for his convictions. He would have none of
Home Rule. Mr. (now Viscount) Morley was one of
those about whom there was little doubt. He would
not waver in fidelity ; and, moreover, the new policy
of his chief was perhaps an older policy with him.
But just as surely as Mr. Morley would go with Mr.
Gladstone for Home Rule, so surely, men thought,
Lord Hartington would not go with him ; and the
majority were quite right.
The opinion, thus proved correct by the event, was
confidently held not only by those who knew Lord
Hartington in any personal sense, but by thousands,
and perhaps by millions, who had never heard him,
had never seen him, and who, in the case of the large
majority, had probably never read a word of his
speeches. Just in what manner it is that the national
2 17

1 8 LORD HARTINGTON
opinion of a public man is formed, whether by one
passing on his own view, and another adopting it,
and the mass thus growing snow-ball fashion, it would
be very hard to say, but of the gradual infiltration
into the bulk of the people of a tolerably definite
estimate of the characters of their leading men there
can be no question. The wonder is that it is so gener
ally correct. The population of Great Britain is
composed of so many millions, " mostly fools," as
Carlyle genially tells us, and probably quite truly ;
but out of this mass of individual foolishness it is
marvellous how some collective sentiment and opinion
is formed which on the whole is just and wise.
Amongst the rest of the leading men of the Eighties,
as, indeed, of every modern period, Lord Hartington
came under the verdict of this national tribunal.
What the nation saw in him was a man slow to act,
slow to think, yet a man who would never be hurried
into action before the slow processes of his thought
had shown him with tolerable clearness the goal
towards which his act would tend. It saw him as a
man who, once his mind was made up about the
desirable end, would very hardly bend from it. They
trusted him as absolutely honest, absolutely sure
to be true to his convictions, having " no axe to grind,"
no ambition to gratify. The accident of his birth and
heritage had put him far above the common tempta
tions which might work upon men to whom less had
been thus given. They liked him, moreover, as an
owner of race-horses, showing what they would not at
all admit to be their common " weakness " for a " bit
of sport." They liked him none the less because they
judged him slow of thought, for the majority of them
were not very quick of brain themselves. Suspicion
is deeply rooted in their nature. Englishmen have
always been a little distrustful of brilliancy, because
brilliancy implies a speed of brain-wave which few

LORD HARTINGTON (DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE) IN THE HOUSE.

18]

HIS UNFAILING JUDGMENT 19
of them can keep pace with and which they fear to
follow, just because they cannot keep close enough
to it to see towards what shore it is tending. They
fear it may dash them upon some rock. They prefer
the slower rate which permits them to see the haven
towards which they hope to move.
All these attributes were summed up for them,
though of course very few would formulate them to
themselves in any conscious estimate, in the per
sonality of Lord Hartington. I happened to say
once to a politician of the other section of the Liberal
Party — that section which had gone docilely with the
great shepherd of the Home Rule flock — that the
qualities of Lord Hartington, his cool, steady judg
ment, his reluctance to be hurried, his freedom from
all emotional excitement and enthusiasm, were such
as to be of great value at times of national crisis.
I had forgotten, for the moment, the exact political
hue of him to whom I spoke, or perhaps I might have
said it otherwise. Be that how it may, his answer
was : " Do you think his qualities would ever have
brought him to the front if he had not been a marquis,
and a duke's son ? "
I had to admit, at once, that they would not.
But then, my friend — I do not know how consciously
or intentionally — had diverted the issue. I had spoken
merely of the intrinsic value of these qualities in a
statesman already near the head of affairs. He had
replied with a question as to their value in lifting
him to that position from the starting ground of —
shall we say ?— a commoner who enjoys no especial
privilege from any achievements of his forebears.
Evidently Lord Hartington 's attributes were the very
opposite of those which we may call " push-ful,"
the attributes that would impel a man from lowly
place to high station. And that very fact, I ventured
to contend — that very fact might be used as a most

20 LORD HARTINGTON
powerful argument in favour of hereditary rank,
and against the theory that if all men are not, indeed,
equal, they ought to start so. The contention of at
least one large school of modern socialistic thought
is that all men ought to commence life with equal
opportunity. They may be right. I am not com
mitting myself to one side or other in this debate.
But I do maintain that if such qualities as those
which Lord Hartington personified may be of value —
and I have not the smallest doubt of their value —
it is a value which cannot conceivably be brought
into the scale in a society which has no members
whom the accident of heredity places, without effort
of their own, in high station. The effort to attain
that station is just the kind of effort which does not
belong to those who have the qualities characteristic
of Lord Hartington.
A very brilliant sketch of Lord Hartington 's slow
moving mental processes has been traced in a very
brilliant book, published a year or so ago under the
title of Eminent Victorians. Mr. Strachey, the writer,
brings it in, incidentally, in his chapter on General
Gordon, showing how the gradual conviction forced
itself on Lord Hartington's mind that Gordon could
not, conceivably, be left to his fate in Khartoum
without, at the least, an effort for his rescue. The
result of that belated effort is another story, and one
most painful to the national conscience, and so must
ever remain ; but at all events it gave Lord Hartington
the opportunity to show, what indeed none ever
doubted of him, that he had the full courage of his
opinion, once it was formed, and would carry it to
its only logical conclusion. This, of course, was
while he was still a member of Mr. Gladstone's
Cabinet, and before the great secession.
It was a prominent feature of his strong character
that he never shrank from an act which he believed

SIR JOHN GORST'S BILL 21
to be his duty because of its unpleasant nature, and
duties of the kind were, perhaps, more often than
we have been allowed to know, delegated to him
by his colleagues who were more acutely sensitive
or less courageous. An amusing instance in point
is the story, which I believe is quite truly narrated of
him, about a certain Education Bill which Sir John
Gorst had very much at heart, but which the Govern
ment found itself obliged to drop. They were all
very sorry when the necessity arose, and there was
much discussion as to the best and most kindly mode
of conveying the decision to Sir John Gorst, so as
to cause him as little pain as possible. There was a
natural reluctance on the part of each of the members
to be the bearer of such unwelcome tidings, and
general relief when Lord Hartington offered to take
the burden off their shoulders and be the herald of ill
news. We may imagine them, as soon as he had
started on his mission, wondering in what form of
soft words he would wrap the message up so as to
break its content gradually and tenderly to the
hearer. And this is how he did it : He went into
Sir John Gorst's room, took up his customary attitude
with his back to the fireplace, and announced curtly,
" Well, Gorst, your damned Bill's dead."
It is just possible that this method of inflicting the
wound, short, sharp, and decisive, may have been
really the most kindly and tactful that could be
desired. I do not know. It is possible that the very
extraordinary bluntness of its delivery in this form
may have imparted into the unwelcome message
some slight comic relief. Blunt, to comicality, in
the narration it certainly sounds, but it does not
appear that Sir John Gorst ever resented it at all,
nor that any estrangement between the two followed
on it. So all was for the best, and Lord Hartington's
courage had saved his colleagues from a job which

22 LORD HARTINGTON
none of them relished. A more subtle diplomatist,
trying a more delicate method, might in the end have
given far more offence. No doubt Lord Hartington
knew the man with whom he had to deal and judged
rightly of the best mode of dealing with him.
The truth is that, although Lord Hartington was
not at all a clever man, he was that which is far better
than clever, he was wise. It is wonderful, looking
through his long political career, how few instances, if
any, we may find in which we may say, " Here he
was wrong ; here he made a mistake." It may be
that he avoided mistakes largely because he was so
little adventurous. He did not take chances, in great
affairs, although he did own race-horses and although
he was fond of bridge at high points. His bridge-
playing was done in his characteristic way — slowly,
with much fumbling at his cards, many cogitating
" hums " and " haws " ; but generally with the
production of the right card at the end of these strange
processes. If the people whom he played with found
it a little trying, they had not the courage to tell him
so, nor would he have minded in the least, nor have
hurried himself at all the more, had they done so.
He was so wise that he knew perfectly well that he was
not clever. It was one of his complaints against his
destiny that all through life it had brought him into
the society of men, and compelled him to engage with
them in big business, who were very much quicker
in thought than himself. He realised it fully, and
in that full realisation and in the undaunted facing
of all its consequences, lay a great part of his strength.
He was absolutely honest, even to that farthest and
most difficult extreme of honesty which gives a man
the rare faculty of being honest with himself. The
honesty of absolute simplicity is a common character
istic of the Cavendishes. I remember Lady Frederick,
who, of course, was not a Cavendish by birth, but had

HIS HONESTY 23
married into the family, in course of telling a story
about some domestic happening, saying, in the most
casual and matter-of-fact manner, " No Cavendish
can tell a lie, so  " The story went on to the con
sequences of this inveterate truth-telling. It was
in a Cavendish house that she told the story, and in
large part with a Cavendish audience, and it was
remarkable that none of them made any comment on
this obiter dictum. It was just accepted as an obvious
matter-of-fact observation, much as if she had said,
" No Cavendish can jump six foot high." I am not
even quite sure whether she said it altogether as in
unqualified praise of their qualities. It had the air of
suggesting in them a lack of the requisite imagination
to invent the thing that is not. In any case, there
it was— this testimony thus lightly given to their
invincible honesty — and no one regarded it as re
markable in any way nor as open to the slightest
question. Lord Hartington, in the power of this really rather
formidable honesty and simplicity of the Cavendishes,
often drove a far cleverer but more pretentious ad
versary into a very nasty corner. His was all the
strength of a man who has the honesty and courage
to admit that he does not know, and it is a courage
which often turns a situation to the singular and even
ridiculous disadvantage of the man whose weakness
is the very common one of pretending, and very
likely of fancying, that he knows more than he does.
It never worried him to confess his own ignorance, and
he was never ashamed of asking questions, in order to
learn ; and in this way he no doubt arrived at acquir
ing a great deal more knowledge than would be
gained by one who was afraid to ask because the ask
ing would be a confession of ignorance. When one
who is thus pretending, or thus self-deceiving, is
asked by one who has none of these pretences, a

24 LORD HARTINGTON
question of some simple kind and is unable to produce
a sufficient answer, the garment of pretence begins
very quickly to wear grievously thin and to reveal
a nakedness beneath which compels the wearer to a
blush. One of the Cecils, of the generation now taking
active and distinguished part in public affairs, told
me a delightful tale of himself and Lord Hartington,
very characteristic of the latter. They were in the
smoking room at Hatfield. No one else was in the
room. They had sat for a long while in silence, the
young fellow, lately down from College, not caring
or daring to interrupt the soliloquy of the famous
politician whose mind, the young man doubted not,
was revolving great affairs of State. At length,
after all this rumination, the great man spoke, and
this is what he said : "I can never understand how
it is that hot water runs all over a house in the pipes
— it goes up to the top of a house — can you ? "
" Well, then," said this young Cecil, telling me the
story, " I began to tell him all that I remembered
about that sort of thing — what I'd heard at school,
how hot water was lighter than cold and so it rose
up in the pipes and went all over the house. He
listened very attentively all the time I was talking,
and I was rather pleased with myself. I thought
I did it all rather well. When I had done he did not
say anything for a minute or so. I was rather dis
appointed, expecting him to say how clearly I had
explained it ; and then at last he said, ' I don't
think that can be it ! ' "
That was all ; not another comment, good or bad ;
no praise to the young fellow for having at all events
done his best to give an explanation ; no alternative
suggestion offered to this one thus curtly rejected.
But it was an observation which had its reward,
for luckily the young fellow, shy though he was and

HIS ARTISTIC SIDE 25
tremulously expectant of a word or two of commenda
tion, was blessed with an acute sense of humour,
and has cherished the incident in inalienable posses
sion ever since. There is not the slightest doubt
that it has afforded far more gratification in the end
than the highest laudation at the moment could
have given.
Of course Lord Hartington was, as usual, perfectly
correct in his judgment. The explanation proffered
by the young man was not " it," nor anything like
"it." The cause, as I take it, why water rises in
the hot-water pipes and flows all over the house is
the same as the cause why the cold water flows
upwards similarly ; namely, that the water in both
cases is brought from a higher source, and that the
weight from above forces the water in the pipes to
" seek its own level," as the common and not very
illuminating phrase has it. But that does not
matter : the story's the thing — the story and the
striking and humorous presentment of Lord Harting
ton's way of thought and singularly blunt way of
expression. There was one side of his nature which was con
tinually suppressed and hidden under his cold and
unsympathetic manner, and that is the artistic and
aesthetic side. Music and poetry, the latter especially,
had a great attraction for him. I do not know of
any verses of his composition, but I should not be
in the least surprised to hear that he had so written.
It is quite unlikely that a man so fond of reading
poetry would not have made some attempt at self-
expression by the same means, though it is perhaps
still more unlikely that a man of Lord Hartington's
reserved nature would have allowed any eye but his
own to read his poetic compositions. His skill in
putting words together was considerably greater
than might be gathered from listening to his speeches.

26 LORD HARTINGTON
His delivery was not good ; he hesitated and thought
long. But when you read the speech which had
sounded so poorly it was surprising how well the
periods flowed and how sequent and close was the
train of argument. All through the piece he was a
man whose outer aspects did but little justice to the
strength and balance of the qualities underlying them.
His statue in Whitehall is an admirably good like
ness, giving just that impression of cold, proud aloof
ness which his living presence was apt to convey.
That it is an impression which greatly belied the
really good and kind heart of its original, I have
just stated, but it is scarcely to be expected that the
marble shall reveal more of the truth than the living
flesh of which it is the copy. It gives us the im
pression, too, which is precisely just, of a man whose
sense of public duty was profound, and whom no
light consideration would divert from the line to
which he was convinced that duty pointed. If no
place is to be found in a pure democracy for statesmen
of Lord Hartington's peculiar gifts, it is very certain
that democracy will be by so much the poorer for
such purity.

CHAPTER IV
CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
THE most strange and remarkable character
of all the men who figured largely in the
Eighties was that of Charles Stewart
Parnell. That is a statement which may
be made with some confidence, and without any
avowal of political bias. Whether we rate him hero,
as did some, or villain, as did more, we may never
doubt that his qualities were very different from
those of our common humanity. It was a character,
indeed, so strange as scarcely to appear quite human :
more like some weird, rather diabolic freak ; rather
diabolic, and yet with some qualities that came near
the heroic. Quite an extraordinary man.
I was saying this, or something like this, to a friend
— a statesman still living, and at that time in the
Cabinet — who knew him rather intimately, which
I did not. " Well," he said, " perhaps he is
something of an enigma; but it is an enigma with
a key. You most remember this : the master
passion of Parnell's life was not love of Ireland, it
was hate of England. If you will bear this in mind
you will find that it explains very much."
That is a terrible indictment of a man, especially
in the mouth of a friend. I do not think that the
friend realised at all how terrible it was. It is at
once giving over the man as entirely diabolic, with
no heroic trait to redeem him ; for to take hate as
the mainspring of life's action is to become very
27

28 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
devil. But Parnell surely was something other and
better than this. If it was no more than hate of
England that he lived to gratify — well, he had his
opportunities for this again and again, and he turned
them to account. We must admit that ; but in fair
ness we must admit also that he always contrived
to turn those same opportunities to the advantage
of Ireland. It would be extravagant to say that he
did, or tried to do, good to Ireland, merely because
Ireland's good was England's wrong. He could
have done his ill turns to England equally without
the good turns to Ireland. He was not all hate.
But that he was very largely animated by hate
we cannot doubt, and part of the wonder about him
is that a sentiment so vivid, so deep, and so enduring,
ever should have taken such entire possession of a
man so cold, so hard, so unimpressionable. It seems
to have been one of those cases, of which instances
are not rare, of the invasion of a nature generally
unresponsive by a single powerful sentiment. And
it is just because it is single that it is powerful, having
fewer rivals than those which meet and clash in the
souls of men more easily and more often invaded and
influenced. Parnell, as everybody knows, this uncrowned King
of Ireland, was purely English. It appears that he
had not a drop of the Celt in him. His forebears
came to Ireland from Cheshire : I think in the time
of Charles Stewart's great-grandfather, or a generation
earlier. This great-grandfather became Chancellor
of the Irish Parliament, and gave up his office because
he would not vote for the Act of Union. Irish
nationalism, therefore, was at least two generations
old in the blood of these quite English Parnells by
the time that Charles Stewart came to the fore.
His name Stewart he had from his mother, who
was an American. A brother of the Chancellor's

C. S. PARNELL.

28]

MR. O'BRIEN'S BIOGRAPHY 29
great-grandfather was a member of the English
Government, and it was he that brought the title of
Lord Congleton into the family. Somewhere back
among the branches of the genealogical tree roosted
Thomas Parnell, the poet. Thus the inheritance of
this Parnell of the Eighties was not without its
various distinction. It promised something, but
he would have been a gifted prophet who would have
foretold the nature of the product which the promise
bore. When Charles was at Cambridge it seems that a
thing happened which had consequences quite dis
proportionate with their cause. We may imagine him,
if we please, a shy, reserved youth, with feelings
sensitive and deep, which he hid under an affected
cynicism of manner. His biography has been
splendidly done in the two volumes by his friend,
Mr. Barry O'Brien. It is so well done, and the
subject is such an interesting one for study, that
after you have named Boswell's Johnson, and set
that on a shelf by itself as a thing apart from all
other biographies, you then have to put Barry
O'Brien's on the next shelf below, along with Lock-
hart's Scott and very few others. It is great biography.
I do not think that it contradicts such an impression
of the young man at Cambridge as I have tried to
give. But, however that be, it was while he was there
that he heard of an outrage, of what evidently struck
him as an intolerable and an unforgivable outrage,
inflicted on his mother in their Irish home in Wicklow.
She was an American, as aforesaid. She was suspected
of Fenian sympathies. Already, two generations back,
this English family had given cause to know that it
stood for " Ireland for the Irish," by the opposition
of the Non-juring Chancellor to the Act of Union.
While Charles Parnell was away at Cambridge there
had been some Fenian trouble in the neighbourhood

30 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
of his home. The Parnells were supposed either to
have concealed Fenians in their house, or documents
of a compromising kind, or weapons. At all events
a search party arrived, insisted on going through
the house, would not be denied entrance every
where, actually would penetrate into Mrs. Parnell 's
own bedroom and turn possible hiding-places upside
down there with sacrilegious hands.
That, at least, is how the young man at Cambridge
received it, when all was related to him. It was
rank sacrilege, and violation of what should have
been the sanctity of his mother's room. It appears
that the act, of no great importance in itself, sank
deep down into the soul of this proud, sensitive, aloof
young fellow. He brooded upon it, probably more
than a little morbidly. It grew to seem a monstrous
thing. Its memory and its infamy influenced his
whole nature. It turned him into a hater, a hater
of the England by whose order this thing had been
done. That, as it appears, has to be taken as in some
sort the key to the enigma of his very extraordinary
mentality and story. It is very strange, but it is
not unprecedented, that a root of bitterness springing
from such a source as this, and implanted in a sensitive
soul at its most impressionable age, should morbidly
affect a whole life. That there was a strain of mor
bidity in Parnell's nature it is scarcely possible to
doubt. He showed, again and again, a ruthlessness,
not only towards England, but towards the people
of his own adopted, and, in spite of all, as I believe,
his beloved Ireland, which certainly was not normal.
They were traits of which he had already given
evidence in boyhood. He was a cricketer, apt to
assume all such captaincy as might be conceded to
him, for he was masterful and dogmatic. Also he
was litigious and pugnacious, exacting, like Sarah
Battle, the rigour of the game. If an incoming

A DOMESTIC OUTRAGE 31
batsman exceeded by a second the two minutes'
interval allowed since the outgoing of his predecessor,
he claimed the wicket at once, and with insistence.
In such sort the boy was father to the man. Then
he was nervous and excitable. He was apt to sleep
walking. All this is evidence of a hyper sesthesia
which may have taken on that cloak of cynical
callousness in some measure as a protection.
The men of the search party that invaded his
mother's bedroom do not seem to have found any
thing to incriminate any one, unless it were a sword
belonging to Charles, which they took away with
them. What he wanted with, or what right he had
to, the sword I do not know, but probably the taking
of it from him was as another coal laid on the fire
of his wrath. And what finally kindled all into a
white heat which never cooled during his life, was
the treatment — namely, the death penalty — meted
out to certain of the Fenians, whose only offence,
a mere nothing in the eyes of Ireland, was that they
had killed a sergeant of the Constabulary. A howl
of execration rose up in all the South of Ireland, and
translated itself into lurid words in the papers, at
this perfectly just sentence, as I presume that it was.
But, of course, what appealed to the young Parnell
was the howl, and not the justice. After that, he
determined that he would go into Parliament and
would do — much as in fact he did, though, of course,
he had not formed any detailed plan in his mind.
He made plans slowly. He spoke with difficulty.
One might draw a certain queer, but not inapt, com
parison between him and Lord Hartington in their
mental processes. Both were slow of thought
and slow to act, preferring silence to speech; both
exceedingly resolute, even to death, when their
slow minds were resolved. Parnell, to be sure,
gave the impression, and had the fame, of a far more

32 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
clever man than Hartington, slow of thought though
both men were ; but the difference was that Parnell,
intently concentrated on the one great interest of his
life, had always thought out beforehand any incident
bearing on it. He was never caught unprepared.
Hartington, on the other hand, with a far less ab
sorbed interest in the political subjects in which his
position and sense of duty obliged him to engage,
began his study of each new incident or problem as
and when it came into his purview for decision.
It was thus a long while before he was prepared with
his answer or scheme. Parnell, having foreseen
each event, had his answer and scheme already
thought out in all like cases.
I do not know about Parnell being honest, as
Hartington was. He proved himself more than once
perfectly capable of that of which the Cavendishes,
as a family, were said to be incapable — telling a lie.
But he was, I think, if we may say so, an honest
liar. I do not believe that he would tell a lie on trivial
occasions to deceive a friend, but I also believe that
there is no lie that he would not tell, no promise that
he would not break, either to friend or foe, if the
occasion was the furtherance of a cause which he
had at his heart. He would be quite unscrupulous
then. So he resolved to go into Parliament, with such a
programme in his mind as all this suggests ; and
after a rejection or two he was elected — in 1875.
It is curious how everything worked to intensify
Parnell's hate of England. He found himself, though
pure English, looked down on as an Irishman at Cam
bridge ; he found the Irish Party looked down on ,as
a thing of naught, in the English Parliament. What
attracted the Fenians to this young outlander, shy,
difficult of speech, and seemingly timid, was that
he would stand up in the English Parliament and,

HIS CONTEMPT OF THE HOUSE 33
firmly and coldly, though with stammering eloquence,
maintain his equal right with the best English
member, even of the Front Bench.
He spoke little and read little, and his thought
did not travel a wide range ; but he thought a great
deal for all that, and it was thought concentrated
within a small circle, namely the best means of making
the voice of Ireland heard in the English Parliament,
the best way of embarrassing the English Parliament
until it should listen to that voice, and also the best
means to employ outside the House in order to achieve
that liberty without which Ireland never could be
free of the humiliation that England stamped upon
her. Those were his aims and the objects of his
thought — thought, cool, slow, wise, so far as means to
obtain these ends were concerned — and the Irish
Party in the House and the Fenians outside it very
quickly perceived that they had in their midst one
who was entirely unlike themselves, yet one who was
devotedly attached to their own aims ; and they
realised, too, that, largely on account of his unlike-
ness to the rest, and of the qualities in which his
difference consisted, he was the man to lead them.
His own manner never gave the slightest reason
to doubt but that he thought so, too. He treated
them with a frank contempt which, while it galled
them, yet disposed them to accord the superiority
which he so obviously and even so offensively claimed.
At least, they could say among themselves, he is no
less offensively superior in his manner towards the
Englishmen too, and that is how we like to see them
treated. He treated the leader of his own Party.
Mr. Butt, in just the same manner. Against all
Butt's instructions and injunctions, he obstructed
business in Parliament and incited others, especially
Biggar, who could speak from dewy eve to early
morn, if need were, to obstruct also. When Butt
3

34 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
publicly rebuked him, he kissed the rod smilingly, in
the knowledge that Butt's rebuke in the English
House, and the sympathy with which the House
heard it, were the undoing of Butt in the eyes of
Ireland. All that, however, happened before the Eighties.
By 1880 Butt was dead, Parnell was the acknowledged
leader of the Irish Party ; he was also President of
the Land League, and it was in this year that he went
to America, making speeches and arousing much
enthusiasm for Home Rule. He invented the in
genious, the devilish, and the effective device to which
Captain Boycott, the agent of Lord Erne, had the
unfortunate distinction of lending his name. In the
following year the Government arrested him and
threw him into Kilmainham gaol. With coercive
measures in full force it is not very obvious what else
they could have done. To imprison subordinates
and leave him at large would not have been very
logical. But it had the effect of increasing his in
fluence with the more extreme of the Irishmen. They
had complained of his " moderation," but the fact
that the British Government proved its sense of his
dangerous qualities by imprisoning him did not
endorse the view of him as a " moderate " man.
He came out of Kilmainham with his position greatly
strengthened. It was early in 1882 that the Government, despair
ing of the effects of their Coercion Act, released
him, but there followed only a short interval before
the passing of the Crimes Act, as a sequel to the
tragedy, in Phoenix Park, when Lord Frederick
Cavendish, the Chief Secretary, was murdered with
Mr. Burke, the Under Secretary. It is said that the
murderous attack was intended on the latter only,
and that the former suffered purely from the unhappy
accident of being in his company at the time.

THE FORGED LETTERS 35
There can be small doubt to-day that Parnell was
terribly distressed. A little later, when he had to
go through his famous trial, with the forged letters
of the infamous Pigott as evidence of his active
approval of outrageous crimes, there was a section
of the British public prepared to deem him capable
of the worst of them, and even to have known before
hand of the proposed attack on the Castle officials,
and to have acquiesced in it. With the exposure
of the forgeries in the letters and Parnell's inevitable
acquittal, the weight of the' worst suspicion was
lifted. Burne-Jones, who went to see the trial, said
that Parnell's face in aspect was Christlike ! But
some portion of the suspicion, no doubt, continued
to prevail. Persons who would not take the trouble
of studying the most patent facts would still throw
out dark hints. It was a case of some of the
mud sticking. Forster, in the House, vehemently
and acrimoniously accused him of implicity in crimes
and outrage very soon after the Phoenix Park inci
dent, and it took all the persuasions of his friends
to induce Parnell to make any reply or reference at
all to the accusation. When he did, at length, yield
to those persuasions, the form of his reply was in
effect a declaration of contemptuous indifference to
a charge coming from such a source and brought
before such a Court. He virtually denied the right
of the English House of Commons to sit in judgment ;
said, iroundly, that he did not care a scrap for their
verdict, that it was to Ireland only that he looked
for approval of his actions, and for Ireland's sake
that all were done. He did just say that it was the
merest moonshine to suppose that he could have
any connection with the campaign of violence, or
could imagine that Ireland's cause could be in any
way helped by it ; but he said it in such a way as to
convey the impression that it was a purely incidental

36 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
statement, that he regarded it as hardly worth the
making, and as so obvious that none but a fool could
require it to be affirmed. Of course the whole scorn
ful tone of the speech made the worst possible im
pression on the House. Equally of course, and just
because of the bad impression which it made there,
it created the strongest possible impression in Par
nell's favour in Ireland — which is what he cared
about. He was not, really, addressing himself to
the English House of Commons in this so-called
" defence " : his words were meant for the people
of Ireland and for the Irish in America ; and by them
they were welcomed and cherished. That was the
right way to talk to the House of Commons — to
show them that you did not care a pin for them or
their opinion of your actions. Here was a man
ready to do all and dare all for Ireland's sake. Parnell
had foreseen it. He was an extraordinary Parlia
mentary tactician.
A little later we find almost all the leading English
statesmen in turn coquetting with him, each trying
whether the Irish leader could be brought to fall
in with his own pet scheme of extension of local
government for Ireland, or Home Rule in one or
other of its more limited senses — Chamberlain, Bright,
Randolph Churchill, Hartington a little, finally Mr.
Gladstone going farther than all the rest and at
length producing something with which Parnell was
graciously pleased to express himself moderately
satisfied. It was a measure of satisfaction which
would leave room for the entry of an Oliver Twist
like demand for more of the same kind very shortly.
Meanwhile had taken place that short-lived alliance of
Home Rulers with Tories, when Lord Carnarvon was
Lord-Lieutenant, of which Mr. (now Lord) Morley
spoke to a friend of mine as " an unholy alliance."
Unholy or not, it was not of long duration. Mr.

THE GREAT COQUETTE 37
Gladstone, with his proposals going so much farther
towards meeting Irish demands, outbid all that
the Tories dared offer, and the Home Rulers returned
to stand by the Liberals again in a brotherhood
to which Mr. Morley was able to give his unquali
fied blessing.
And all these wooers, no matter what success
or ill-success they met with from the Great Co
quette, for that is a title which Mr. Parnell thoroughly
well deserves, came back with one single chief im
pression. ",What chiefly struck you about Parnell ? "
you asked. The answer of one and all was the same :
" His silence."
It was quite a just answer. He had it — the gift
of silence — almost beyond any other man who was
in any degree intellectual. It was a great source of
strength to him. Men always wonder and speculate,
and fear a little, about the thoughts that are going
on in the brain of a man who does not utter them, and
generally, in all probability, they attribute to the un
spoken thoughts a subtlety and depth which they
might not be found to equal if they were brought
to the utterance. Even with Mr. Gladstone, whom
he came into more accord with than any of the
others, his silence was remarkable. He was invited to
Hawarden, and went there. I was given an account
of what happened by a fellow-guest. " It was won
derful," said the raconteur, naturally falling into a
cricketing metaphor ; " Mr. Gladstone kept bowling
him half-volleys all the time, but Parnell never
stepped out to one once. He hardly answered.
He said hardly anything at all."
Nevertheless the visit was quite a success, in the
sense that all were disposed to like him, although
all felt that there was something a little uncanny
and scarcely human about him and his reserve.
There are two words, often coupled in our English

38 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
conversation, which certainly Parnell went through
life using less frequently than any other known
man who has possessed the gift of words so long.
Those two words were " Thank you." He had
a capacity, which amounted to genius, of refraining
from saying " Thank you." It had the effect of
making men feel, when they had done something
for him, or made some concession to him, that they
had not done enough, or, at least, not as much as
he had expected. It was irritating. It perhaps
irritated them to give him more in order to see
whether they could not wring a word of gratitude
out of this irresponsive being. But they could not.
Ingratitude is the independence of the heart. Par
nell, intellectually a creature of strange independence,
was independent no less, or even more, on the senti
mental side. Once he was in money difficulties.
Mortgagees were foreclosing on his patrimony. The
debt was some thirteen thousand pounds. He was
always careless of money, and probably most of the
debt was incurred through political ways of dis
bursement. Be that how it may, his friends opened
a subscription to pay off the indebtedness and save
his estate. Enthusiastic admirers subscribed up
to something like forty thousand pounds, mostly
in small sums and from small people. " Parnell's
tribute," it was called. He was presented with the
cheque just before a great political meeting in the
Rotunda, so that he might have a convenient oppor
tunity of giving thanks to the people for this wonder
ful offering. He stuck the cheque in his pocket ;
he addressed the people on the political situation ;
and he never said a word in reference to the cheque
at all, or showed the smallest sign of gratitude for it !
It might never have been given. Surely his was an
independent heart !
But if the many wooers got but little out of this

THE ALLIANCE WITH GLADSTONE 39
unpromising Penelope — after all, that most famous
classic instance has some right to contest with him
the title of the Great Coquette — no one can well
say how much he was getting from them the while.
There is not a doubt that he was learning, learning,
learning. He was a man who read little, but learnt,
as he silently listened, from the words of men, and
thought much on what he heard. He learnt how
to deal with men — not men only in their common
humanity, but with each man according to his in
dividual difference. And he learnt just how far
each man and each party, and each little group with
in a party, was prepared to go in the direction of
giving to Ireland (for the sake of the peace which his
obstructive methods had made them yearn for as
men yearn only for that which they find to be very
hard to get) that which he deemed that she required.
It was knowledge which enabled him to take the
utmost advantage of every occasion as it arose, and
to judge to a nicety how far he might go, or might
permit others of his party to go, in way of insult
to the Mother of Parliaments before the spokesman
of the great mother would suspend them from further
present opportunity of insult.
We all know, of course, what the result was of
Mr. Gladstone's wooing. The Great Coquette dis
missed all other wooers when he found that Gladstone
was ready to yield. The alliance was struck ; with
what result we are aware : the introduction of the
Home Rule Bill of 1886, the schism of the Liberal
Party, the formation of the Unionist Party, the re
jection of the Bill, the General Election, and the
return to power — to overwhelming power — of the
Unionists. The figures read : " Unionists, with
Conservatives, 393 " ; " Gladstonian Liberals, with
Irish, 275." Just as Hartington had announced to
Gorst, " Well, Gorst, your damned Education Bill's

40 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
dead," so now the country said, with equal decision,
to Mr. Gladstone, " Well, Gladstone, your damned
Home Rule Bill's dead."
It was dead, and dead, too, therewith, all hopes
in Parnell's mind — if ever he had hopes (which is
most doubtful) — of Home Rule for Ireland passing
the English Parliament. Obstruction had proved
a useful weapon. It had achieved the end of com
pelling the House to turn its eyes attentively on
the small group of Irishmen which it had theretofore
been able to disregard. But really it had not been
much more than an irritant. Some counter to it
was sure to be raised, and was devised in the form of
the " Closure." Hereafter neither Biggar nor Sexton,
nor any of those extraordinary word-weavers, might
weave interminably. In a House with a Unionist
majority of 1 1 8 the little Irish group could carry
no weight to tilt a scale. The situation had the air
of impasse.
So Parnell seems to have felt it. He attempted
a Land Bill, probably knowing it was doomed to
failure. He prophesied, before its rejection, that if
it did not pass violence and disorder would follow.
It was thrown out, and, true to prophecy, the Plan
of Campaign, and all that it involved, ' was the se
quence. At this time Parnell, doubtless, was very
weary of the struggle. Some tried to incriminate
him as the originator of the deliberate series of out
rages due to the Plan, and of its very organisation.
As a matter of fact the truth appears to be that he
was too ill a man and too harassed a man to have
any fight or desire for fight left in him. Now and
again the old fighting spirit would flare up and drive
the worn machine, but it was rather a flickering and
fitful business. He realised, too, that not only he,
but his Ireland, needed above and before all else peace
and rest. So to deem him the soul of the Plan of

COMMITTEE ROOM 15 41
Campaign was as absurd as to deem him the instigator
or accomplice of the Phoenix Park murders. He
deplored these acts of violence, not on account of
their violence, but on account of their ill-advisedness
at the moment.
It was the moment when the Times published
those articles, " Parnellism and Crime," which led
to the appointment of the " Parnell Commission " —
Justices Hannen, Day, and A. L. Smith — to the
evident and incontrovertible proof of the forgery
of the published " facsimile " letter, to the suicide of
the forger Pigott, to the triumphant acquittal of
Parnell. There followed a time, in the reaction, when he was
made a kind of pet in Liberal circles — a curious pet,
whom all petted and stroked, but who never gave
back a purr in response. He was received with
heart-rending enthusiasm at a dinner of the Eighty
Club, such statesmen as Lord Spencer and Lord
Rosebery making very much of him. There was
only one heart which did not seem moved by the
enthusiasm — Parnell's. He was still frigid.
Then fell the bombshell of the O'Shea affair,
explosively. Of course it was no new affair : it had been there,
a known fact to his friends, in the background of
Parnell's life, for years. But suddenly it exploded.
No one did not know of it. What should the Party
do? That was the question which was agitated in
Committee Room 15, Parnell himself in the chair,
conducting the case against himself in a position of
official impartiality, yet straining points to his ad
vantage in all the spirit that he showed when captain
of a cricket eleven and claiming the wicket of the
opponent who did not come to the crease within the
statutory two minutes. So the question was voted

42 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
on, and the decision was cast : the Party would be
faithful ; they could not part from their old leader.
But they had reckoned, and had voted, without
their great new ally, Gladstone, and his conscience.
He and his conscience take counsel together : they
call in Morley to their debates, and the result is a
letter saying that Mr. Gladstone can no longer remain
leader of the Liberal Party if Mr. Parnell remain
leader of the Irish, that Party's ally.
Again there is debated the question in Committee
Room 15. The old question is re-opened. And this
time, in spite of the fighting of the leader, in spite
of his influence and his ancient fame, the vote, taken
anew, goes otherwise. A majority secede, scared
by the Gladstone letter, which had found its way
into the papers. Parnell, if a leader at all, leads
only a minority. The Party — that is, the majority —
is under McCarthy. It is the end, and a sad and
rather squalid end, withal.
Politically speaking it is actually his death. He
glimmered up again, with new-found energy, over the
Kilkenny election. But what could it matter ? He
was wearied to death, worn out with fighting, with
illness of a rheumatic kind, with all the harassing
and the debacle that the wretched O'Shea entangle
ment brought. He still kept the frigid, proud face
to the world, but the man was done. At, or soon
after, the Kilkenny election he caught a chill. Of
course he took no care. He would not have been
himself had he cared. He travelled with the chill
on him. In time he sickened and died, a finished
man, though not by any means an old man, in the
autumn of 189 1.
Certainly he allowed himself no chance. The
cynic coldness which gave him that independence
of heart, with all that it brought him of power, and
the little that it brought him of love, he extended

HIS SENSITIVENESS 43
even to himself. For himself he had as little tender
ness as for another. One desperate human passion
we must admit that he had, and must wonder at
it and deplore it : wonder at it the more because of
the tragic cost at which he clung to it, wonder at its
white-hot intensity in a nature generally, or at
least apparently, so cold.
But there we touch perhaps the ultimate question
of the nature, of the personality. Was it a nature
really cold, or was it, as happens, a nature, on the
contrary, singularly sensitive and tender, which had
taken on, as a mask arid a defence, the armour of
an affected callousness, firm-riveted with the strength
of an unusually determined will ?
I do not know the answer: I only suggest the question.
I incline to believe this to be the true key to that
very extraordinary character. There is some evidence
in its support ; for example, that morbid nervousness
indicated by his sleep-walking as a boy. Moreover,
he did retain a tenderness for one at least of his family
— his mother. He would telegraph to her, telling
her not to worry, saying that he was all right. A son
with no sympathetic feeling does not trouble to do
that. That he was a " good " man, in any conven
tional sense, most assuredly I am not claiming for
him. I have already recorded his cynicism in regard
to truth, where untruth would serve his ends. Before
the Parnell Commission he frankly and unblushingly
admitted that the reason why he had made a false
statement was that it might mislead the House of
Commons. The irony of that admission is that, in
point of fact, he was mistaken in giving that account
of it. The true fact had slipped his memory — namely
that he had made the statement in respect to certain
secret societies only, and not, as it was interpreted,
with the intention of its application to all like societies
in Ireland. But that is a detail of no moment : the

44 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL
interesting point is his careless indifference to a trifle
such as purposely and by false statement misleading
the English Parliament. It is highly characteristic.
Certainly, unless it were Mrs. O'Shea, Parnell had
none, so far as one may discover, whom we may call,
in any sense at all intimate, his friend ; none to whom
he unbosomed his thoughts so that they might tell
us what manner of man he really was. To those
closest about him he remained a sphinx.
A singular trait in his nature, as it appears on the
surface, is his superstition. Religion seems to have
had no grip on him whatever, but he was genuinely
gripped by superstitions, childish and Celtic, even
if he had no other quality of the Celt. When he was
very ill he aroused himself hurriedly to blow out a
third candle which one had lighted who was writing
a political document at his bedside, just because
three candles was the number that are lighted about
the corpse laid out for a " wake." The ill-luck
that the triple illumination must bring he could not
bear. Similarly, he would have none of another
document of like kind in which the clauses were
thirteen. It could have no fortune. The clauses
must be cut to twelve or stretched to fourteen.
It sounds scarcely credible, but his very faithful
biographer, Mr. O'Brien, sets both instances down
as indubitably true. We cannot doubt them. But
may we not see in them again some witness to that
view of his extraordinary character which I have
suggested ? I would not press them, but I think
that they are not without significance. That Charles
Stewart Parnell was a good man, as I have said,
few will claim ; that he had elements of greatness,
very few, I think, can doubt.

CHAPTER V
JOHN BRIGHT
THERE can be little question that of all
those who deserted Mr. Gladstone's
banner when he carried it into his Home
Rule campaign in 1886, the squire whose
loss was most grievous and most costly to him was
Mr. Bright. Mr. Bright's, of course, was a name to
conjure with in the Sixties and earlier — in the days
of Cobden, the Manchester School, the Corn Laws,
and so on. It really needed some such impetus as
the leading of his chieftain into what he deemed the
perilous country of Home Rule to make Mr. Bright
reveal himself as still a great power, capable of in
fluencing the thoughts and the votes of large numbers.
There has been some misunderstanding as to what
Mr. Bright actually did at the time of the Home Rule
schism. Very careless readers of events have assumed
that he was a member of Mr. Gladstone's Government,
and that he left it, to join the new Unionist Party,
on account of irreconcilable difference of opinion
about Irish matters, the actual fact being that he
threw up his office some four years earlier, because he
found himself utterly unable to approve of that
" forward " policy in Egypt which led up to the
bombardment of Alexandria in the days of Arabi
Pasha. It was impossible for Mr. Bright, with his
peace-loving character, to agree in any policy that
could be termed forward, except under clear and
stern necessity for its forwardness ; and it was equally
45

46 JOHN BRIGHT
impossible for his truth-loving character to acquiesce,
even tacitly, in any policy opposed to his principles
of right and wrong. Therefore he resigned office,
so as to express his disapproval of the Government's
action and to play no part in it.
These being the facts of the case, it has happened
that some readers of events, only one degree less
careless than those who imagine that he left the
Cabinet on the Home Rule question, have gone to
the other extreme of error and, knowing that it was
not in consequence of the Home Rule Bill that he left
the Government, have assumed in their haste that
he took no part at all in that debate and its immediate
consequences, and that he counted for nothing in the
result. Very far from that, he probably, though
not in the Cabinet at the time of the bringing in of
the Bill, counted far more than any other single man,
not so much^ perhaps, in its rejection, as in the ulti
mate sequence to that rejection — which was the
appeal to the country, and the General Election which
brought in the Unionists with preponderating power.
Though Mr. Bright had quitted the Government on
the Egyptian policy, he had not, on that account,
gone out of politics nor out of Parliament. He was
still a faithful follower of Mr. Gladstone, though not
active as heretofore in the councils of the Govern
ment ; his fidelity was of long trial and was fully
trusted ; it still remained to be shown that it had a
breaking point beyond which it could not hold.
To many, as I have said already, fidelity to Mr.
Gladstone — the personal fidelity — had come to take
the place of fidelity to principles and convictions.
Mr. Gladstone had become their principle. It never
was so with Mr. Bright. No man had a more exalted
opinion of Mr. Gladstone — and that is a very great
deal to say — than he, and there was one respect in
which he rated Mr. Gladstone higher than any other

[From a photograph by Messrs. Elliott & Fry.)
JOHN BRIGHT.

46]

A GREAT ORATOR 47
man in the country, as I imagine, rated him. For
beautiful eloquence and power of oratory in its finest
and widest sense, there was only one man, I believe,
of all those who had heard both statesmen speak,
and thus had the opportunity to judge of them, who
rated Mr. Gladstone above Mr. Bright. All others
arranged them in the opposite order of merit : Mr.
Bright first, Mr. Gladstone second. The one excep
tion, the one man who put Mr. Gladstone first, was
Mr. Bright. I think it is Justin McCarthy who
recorded that Bright waxed quite angry with him
for suggesting that he, Bright, was a finer orator than
Gladstone. He at once began quoting passages
from Mr. Gladstone's speeches to prove the contrary.
Most of us find it enough to say, in respectful admira
tion of the powers of both, that, other points of com
parison apart, Bright had none of the verboseness
which often impaired the grandeur of Mr. Gladstone's
periods. By that alone Bright is at once established,
where the competition might in other points be a
close one, as the superior. One speaks, of course,
of the comparative merits in set speech. In debate,
strong and witty as Mr. Bright would be at times,
Mr. Gladstone, immensely more experienced, was also
immensely more powerful and trenchant.
In spite, however, of this lofty and in one regard at
least exaggerated estimate of Mr. Gladstone's gifts
and genius, Bright's character was too strong and
too firm in its conviction ever to accept a personal
fidelity in lieu of a principle for his guide. Where
he could no longer agree, he had the courage and the
independence instantly to assert a difference of opin
ion, and, faithful to that opinion, to part company.
He had sat and voted as a Liberal in the years between
the Alexandria business in 1882 and the Home Rule
business in 1886. He had spoken seldom : he seldom
did speak exeept on great issues. Little issues did

48 JOHN BRIGHT
not appeal to his very practical turn of mind, neither
did eloquence for its own sake, though he was so great
a master of it, interest him at all. He never spoke
for speaking's sake, but always for the sake of the
cause he was pleading. All this was part of that
simple sincerity which he reverenced above all other
qualities in politics. It was part of the reason for his
profound reverence of the chief whom his convictions
drove him to desert, that Mr. Gladstone was so
deeply sincere and earnest.
Just because he had spoken little and had not
shown greatly in the forefront of the battle, people
in the country had ceased to think much of Bright :
he was fading out of the fickle mind of the multitude.
Then came the Home Rule challenge, as we may call
it, of the trusted chief. It was as a gage thrown down
by way of a test to faith. Who would accept it ?
How would it be taken ? There is little doubt that
Mr. Gladstone was sadly disappointed at its reception.
His personal influence was very powerful, but it
was not quite all that he had believed it to be. Per
haps that is hardly a fair statement of the case ;
perhaps we should say, rather, that he believed so
implicitly in the justice of the Home Rule cause,
once he had made it his own — it was his custom,
and a prime source of his ability to bend men to his
view, to deem thus of all causes which commended
themselves to his own conviction — that he could not
conceive it possible that others would not come to a
like opinion when he explained to them his grounds
for it. That probably, rather than any egotistic
idea of his personal power over them, persuaded him
that he would be followed faithfully. There were a
few, naturally, of whom there was doubt. No one
expected Hartington to come down any untried by
ways at the bidding of any chief. But of Bright
there was some reason to think, questions of leadership

A LOVER OF ORDER 49
quite apart, that a Home Rule policy for Ireland
would meet views to which he had already given
expression. He was always the friend of the op
pressed, always in favour of liberty. He had already
shown himself sympathetic with the sufferings of
Ireland and anxious to relieve them. All this, how
ever, was before his leaving the Cabinet, and at least
one significant incident had happened since which
might have shown that Mr. Bright was not likely
to support a measure calculated to throw power into
the hands of men so likely to abuse it as the chief
men of the Irish Party had proved themselves — even
as far back as 1883. In the House of Commons he
had spoken of them as "an Irish rebel party," and
had taunted the Conservatives for seeking alliance
with them. The taunt was fiercely resented. Sir
Stafford Northcote moved a resolution declaring it
to be a breach of privilege, and only failed in carrying
it by a small balance of votes. All possible advertise
ment and publicity, therefore, had been given to
Mr. Bright's probable attitude and action in view of
the proposals of 1886 ; but still, in consequence of his
earlier sympathies with Irish struggles, and even with
some of the less dangerous of the Fenian activities,
it seems to have been generally thought that he would
be content to follow his old leader into the lobby on
a division. Certainly, whatever doubt faithful Glad-
stonians may have felt as to his attitude, they had
little anticipation of the energy of action into which
he was quickly roused.
The truth is that while Mr. Bright was so ardent
a lover of liberty, he was at least as warmly devoted
to peace and order, and that devotion had been tried
beyond the breaking point by the disorderly and
lawless proceedings which the Irish Party did not
trouble themselves to disavow. The violence, which
they did not even attempt to control, in Ireland had
4

So JOHN BRIGHT
alienated him, had changed him from friend to foe,
and it was a costly loss to the cause of Irish indepen
dence. At several meetings in the country he em
ployed all the force of his eloquence to plead the
maintenance of the Union under the old conditions,
and to oppose the solution suggested by Mr. Gladstone.
His eloquence alone might have accomplished much ;
his personality and the value which men placed on
his judgment achieved far more. Here was an
avowed lover of liberty in the abstract, and one who
had given much of his life to working for its sake —
one, too, who had proved himself Ireland's friend — ¦
most strongly hostile to this measure to give Ireland
freedom. What was the obvious inference to be
drawn ? It was known that no consideration of
party or of profit could weigh with him. Only
one conclusion could be reached, that something
must be radically wrong with the measure itself,
the objections to it must be very grave, if a man of
Mr. Bright's character and disposition could find
nothing to recommend in it and very much to con
demn. There is no doubt whatever that his attitude,
his speeches, and his writings, determined the attitude
of a great number of the electors, and largely helped
to bring in the Liberal-Unionist and Conservative
coalition on the flowing tide.
And whatever men thought of Mr. Bright's political
action at that time, whether it surprised them or
merely fulfilled their expectations, all were astonished
by the almost youthful fire and vehemence with which
he both voiced his views and uttered them in letters.
Those who remembered his eloquence in the troublous
days of the Corn Laws maintained that it had lost
little of its old quality, and were more thanjjja little
superior. They were surprised, not because Mr.
Bright, in the Eighties, was a very old man — the
last year of the decade saw his death, and he was

A NEW INCENTIVE 51
born in the year 181 1 — but there was surprise,
because his powers, when he did make a public appear
ance, had seemed to be failing, or at least to have no
great driving force behind them. Dr. Dale has
written of him, as recorded in the Encyclopcedia
Britannica, in reference to his speech when he took
the Rectorship of Glasgow University, " It was not
the old Bright " ; and, Dr. Dale adds, Mr. Bright told
him at the time, " I am weary of public speaking.
My mind is almost a blank."
This was in 1 882. Of course it gives an exaggerated
account of his state of mental apathy, but constitu
tionally, in spite of all the great work that he did,
he was accounted by his friends and co-workers as
an indolent man. He had no personal ambition.
No adequate driving force therefore, in these days,
as age came upon him, was there to incite him. He
did, in all probability, fall into a relative apathy.
But then, of a sudden, he was like the old horse hearing
the hunting horn once again — he saw a cause which
called forth his enthusiasm, his mental energy and
all his faculties, and he took all the fences with the
zeal of a young one. And although all his eloquence
and persuasion were thrown into the balance against
the larger independence of Ireland, this was not be
cause he loved Ireland less, but because he had.
regretfully come to the conclusion that the time for
such relative independence was not yet, but that
her freedom, as proposed by Mr. Gladstone, would
be a menace both to herself and to the United
Kingdom. Yet it would not be fair comment to say, therefore,
that he changed. Consistency is perhaps a doubtful
virtue in a statesman : it is at least a doubtfully good
master when it is allowed to take the mastery ; and
the idea that it behoves him to be consistent at all
costs has been the bane of many a man's true judg-

52 JOHN BRIGHT
ment. But Mr. Bright was absolutely consistent
throughout his career. It would be difficult to name
a man who changed less. Even in outward aspect,
and even in the fashion of his garment, he changed
very little. It was always something like the garb
of the Nonconformist minister — frock-coat, little tie,
and so on — at the farthest remove possible from that
of the sportsman or the country gentleman, with the
former of whom, at least, he had no sympathy what
ever. He was a man of cities, and typical perhaps
of the provincial cities rather than of the metropolis.
From all portraits and caricatures of him, which
were many, and from all that his contemporaries
tell us, he must have worn the look of a man of middle
age while he was still young. His fashion of shaving
the mouth and leaving a fringe of whiskers and beard
framing the face made him look older than his years,
and he maintained this style to the end. The fringe
grew whiter, and perhaps he wore his hair rather longer,
so that he came to seem somewhat like a venerable
and benevolent old lion maned in grey ; but it was the
fashion to wear the hair rather long, even in his young
days, so he did not alter much even in that regard.
And as he had the aspect of comparative age while
yet a youth, so, certainly, he came early to the
possession of wisdom and to the acceptance of the
highest principles as the guide of his actions. By
religious conviction he was, of course, nonconformist.
His father, Jacob Bright, was a Quaker, a cotton-
miller of Rochdale, and at sixteen years of age John
was already in the business. All his early training
was in the ways of sobriety, carefulness, and godliness,
and he never departed from these paths throughout
life. Literary and philosophic questions attracted
him from the first, and it may be that but for Cobden's
influence and invitation he would never have gone
into public life at all. So soon, however, as the Anti-

LORD SALISBURY'S APPRECIATION 53
Corn Law cause had once made its appeal to him he
found it irresistible, and gave all his great gift of
oratory to its service. From henceforth British
politics demanded him, claimed him, and could not
allow such power to go unused. This son of the
Quaker, the sect of silent listeners, waiting for the
inspiration, discovered himself the possessor of an
oratory which England had long lost, and which,
it may be said, she has not found again since his death.
The appreciation of Lord Salisbury, not a man given
to extravagant praise, has been often quoted, and
it cannot well be bettered : "He was the greatest
master of English oratory that his generation — I may
say several generations — has seen. At a time when
much speaking has depressed, has almost exterminated
eloquence, he maintained that robust, powerful, and
vigorous style in which he gave fitting expression
to the burning and noble thoughts he desired to
utter."

CHAPTER VI
JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
MR. CHAMBERLAIN was one of those
about whose probable action there was
much speculation when Mr. Gladstone
declared for the great adventure. On
the one hand it was known that he had been not
adverse to a liaison with the Political Penelope,
provided always it could be on lines of his own
dictation. That is to say, that he was in favour of
according to Ireland a far more liberal measure of
self-government than she enjoyed, but at the same
time had never declared himself prepared to go the
lengthl proposed in 1 886 by Mr. Gladstone. The Great
Coquette had not repelled those half-hearted advances,
no doubt rating them the while at their true value —
and no higher. No liaison had been formed ; at
the best it may be said to have been but a promising
flirtation. Nevertheless it sufficed to indicate the bent of
Mr. Chamberlain's thought. Being willing, of his
own initiative, to go thus far, might he not, under
the impulse of the great leader's example, go with
him to the end ? That was how the question was
debated, until Mr. Chamberlain himself, at an early
stage in the proposals, gave it a decisive answer.
He resigned his office of President of the Board of
Trade and withdrew from a Government of whose
policy he could not approve. It was said that it was
the specific proposals in regard to the Irish land,
54

{From a photograph by Messrs. Russell & Sons.)
JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.

54]

HIS POLITICAL BENT 55
rather than to the general government of that country,
to which he took particular objection. Be that how
it may, he did not hesitate. He seized the earliest
opportunity afforded by the great debate initiated
by Mr. Gladstone on April 8th, to make his intention
clear, and therewith to make it clear that it was final.
The defection of Mr. Chamberlain was a blow
nothing like so severe as that of Mr. Bright's hostility
to the Home Rule measure, but it was grave, for he
had already assured his position in the country.
It was a position not quite like that of any other
statesman. He was in no sense a democrat. Modern
Socialistic theories would have dismayed him. But
by one means or other, and chiefly perhaps by some
masterful qualities of honesty, courage, and clear
vision, he had impressed his personality on that great
mass of common sense, so immensely wiser than we
should expect from the folly of its individual factors,
which we call British public opinion. He had
attributes and gifts which his acute countenance, with
its very obvious resemblance, in the rather aggressive
nose and other facial angles, to Pitt, did not suggest,
nor was there suggestion of great qualities in the
inevitable eye-glass and the no less inevitable orchid.
His qualities, however, are most justly to be called
great, seeing that, over and above those already
named, they included both sympathy and imagination.
It was not unnatural that when he first came into
the House, " a Birmingham tradesman " as he was
described — in point of fact, partner in a big industry
in that town — the cynic prophecy should be made,
" will turn Conservative and get a peerage." • In
part the prophecy was fulfilled, though he was perhaps
rather pushed into the paths of the Tories than chose
them of his own free will. On the defeat of the Home
Rule Liberals a coalition between the seceders and
the more advanced of the Conservatives almost

56 JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
necessarily followed. Mr. Chamberlain had his
personal ambitions no doubt, but very early in his
career he gave evidence of his sympathy with the
working people, and he never lost that sympathy.
With Abou ben Ahmed, you might write him as one
who loved his fellow men.
Somehow, by virtue of that insight or that inspira
tion which is so inexplicable, yet so indubitable,
a conviction of this characteristic of him had pene
trated into the public opinion of the nation. The
working man believed in this monocled and button
holed gentleman with the sharp features as his friend,
and a useful, valiant, and forceful friend withal. He
was not long in the House before giving it cause to
know the fine edge of his debating weapons. Within
a short while the people supplemented the conviction
of his sympathy with their cause by a further con
viction of the Tightness of his judgment. In a word,
they believed in him.
I very well remember, a few years after the Home
Rule split, dining at one of the big restaurants with
a small party, among which was the wife of one of
the Liberal Ministers. Though she was a firm and
faithful lover of her party, she had an eye for humour,
on whichever side it was to be found. We had just
passed the throes of a General Election, and one or
two were telling stories of election experiences. Then
she came out with this : "I overheard two working
men talking, when they didn't know I was listening.
One asked the other whom he was going to vote for,
and the other said, ' Well, I'm going to vote for 
old Chamberlain, 'cos he's pretty near always right.' "
She gave us the adjective — which I have left decently
blank — the most popular and variously used of all
in the language, at the pitch of a fearless, clear-
ringing voice, which made half the restaurant sud
denly turn astonished eyes upon us and disposed me

"THREE ACRES AND A COW" 57
to an inclination to crawl and hide under the table ;
but it was an admirable expression of the opinion
which the people in general had formed about Cham
berlain. When I told this story some while later to a
Gladstonian Liberal he was very ready to laugh at it ;
" but," he went on, rather petulantly, " it's very funny
that the people have that idea about him, because
as a matter of fact, if you look at his record, you'll
find that he's been pretty nearly always wrong.
There's hardly a measure that he's advocated that's
ever found its way on to the Statute Book."
Perhaps that may be, but even if so, as I might
have pointed out to my friend the Gladstonian who
made the comment, the writing of an Act on the
Statute Book is not a final test of its wisdom. That
last is a proposition which all party politicians will
readily endorse in its application to the enactments
of their opponents. Chamberlain, in his time, brought
forward and advocated many a measure and many a
principle which did not pass into our legislation ; but
they may have influenced national opinion and
affected later legislation which did not own its
connection with them, none the less. George Russell
tells an amusing story of the " three-acres-and-a-
cow " project which Mr. Chamberlain, with Mr. Jesse
Collings, more or less propounded and abetted as
the solution of the agricultural problem. Every
countryman was to possess his cow and his three acres
on which to feed it : that was the project, stated, or
almost caricatured, in its crudest form. Of course,
so stated, it is not practical politics, and of course
Chamberlain, though knowing as little as was possible
about cows, and still more Jesse Collings, who was
perfectly intimate with them, knew that it was not ;
but it was taken as an indication of Mr. Chamberlain's
interest in the agricultural labourer, even if he did

58 JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
not understand the labourer's difficulties. " Three
acres will no keep a coo " was the criticism of the
Scot, who sought to wring a living out of grudging
soil. Acres, as a means of livelihood for cows or
men, are not everywhere the same.
So the project was not practical, but the battle-cry
which it provided was a most useful one. It won
votes, and at a dinner party shortly after the election,
as Mr. Russell tells us, Chamberlain, seeing the figure
of a cow in silver among the ornaments of the table,
apostrophised it : " Oh, you precious animal ! Where
should we be without you ? "
The three acres and a cow were not to be the
salvation of agriculture, but they were the salvation
of the party. Thus Mr. Chamberlain got his roots
well down into the soil of the country and received
much support from it, although he understood it but
slightly, if at all. And long before this, before even
he came up to London and entered the House of
Commons, he had actively interested himself in the
betterment of the working people of Birmingham.
There he received, in return, the support of industry
which he thoroughly understood ; and we may begin
to realise how it was that he struck the popular
opinion in such manner as to receive, whether or
not he deserved, that encomium which the lady in
the restaurant recited in that gay, cheerful voice
which sent shivers down our backs. A little later
again, and he was Colonial Secretary, and in that office
he became identified with a policy which was likely
still more to commend him to the adventurous and
perhaps slightly acquisitive spirit which is one of
the normal characteristics of the Briton. He stood
for " Jingoism " and imperial strength and unity.
We live in a generation which has perhaps forgotten
the very origin of the term " Jingo." I do not refer
to its use as a form of asseveration which all true

THE ORIGIN OF "JINGOISM" 59
lovers of their Ingoldsby Legends will trace back to
the shrine of the good "St. Genulphus." I mean
only its later political use as the label, usually affixed
by its opponents, of an aggressive national mood and
action in foreign affairs. It was actually taken, I
believe, from the words of a song sung at the music-
halls to a rather dismal but easily caught tune at
the time when Russia was feared as the great menace
to our power and to the peace both of Europe and of
Asia. So far as my memory serves it went thus :
" We don't want to fight,
But, by Jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men.
We've got the money, too.
We've fought the bear before.
And we'll fight the bear again,
And the Russians shall not have Constantinople.''
" Ople " — if you please — with a very long dwelling
on the " o." The Russians will not, as it appears,
have Constantinople : the gifted composer was correct
in that prophetic affirmation ; but it was not due to
our arms that that unfortunate bear did not get it.
His own claws were sufficiently effective weapons
for his destruction without our ships and men and
money. But this foolish chorus gives the explanation
of the manner in which that term " Jingo " came
into use to designate the kind of mood which Kipling
was to stigmatise a little later as the mood of the
" frantic boast." Chamberlain, identifying himself
with that Imperialism which would draw close the
bonds between mother country and colonies, Cham
berlain, almost the only man of his day to try to put
himself into the place of the Colonials, so as to see both
Colonial and Imperial problems with the Colonial eye,
Chamberlain, in fact, as first to realise the enormous
and essential importance of the Colonies of the
British Empire if it was to do that task in the world

6o JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
which appeared to be ordained for it, became the
modern and living re-incarnation of St. Genulphus.
For most men he was, in himself, " the living Jingo."
It was an estimate which, though none higher
could possibly be conceived by those who formed it
of him, did him nevertheless, as I am convinced, a
great injustice. I do not believe for a moment that
Chamberlain had any adventurous or acquisitive
ideas or ideals. The notion that he would be in
any real and effective sense at the back of that
puerile attempt at brigandage called the "Jameson
raid," is patently absurd, yet there was a considerable
section that held it as an article of faith for months,
if not for years. He was far too clear-sighted to
desire for Great Britain that she should extend her
burdens beyond those already imposed on her, even
if the prospect of extension were a far more beguiling
one than that abortive effort in the neighbourhood
of Johannesburg. But he was earnest in his aspira
tions that she should at least receive some return from
the burdens, that she should make them a source of
strength, if possible, not of weakness ; and he saw
that this could happen only on the condition that
the links which should bind the children to the mother
were real and of mutual advantage. He thrust
the Colonial question into the forefront of the battle
on every possible occasion, in pursuance of this end,
endeavouring to obtain the best solution of it.
Thus he became associated in men's minds with all
that was most assertive and aggressive in foreign
affairs, for he would stand no truck with a foreign
power which seemed inclined to interfere with or
to limit the Imperial unity. And truly he was
assertive and aggressive enough in those conditions,
but he cherished no ideas of " world dominion."
He knew that Great Britain had fully enough of
the world and of its " white man's burden " for her

" HIS MASTER'S VOICE " 61
share, but he desired that she should be free to deal
with her own in her own way. He was ready to cry
" Hands off ! " to any that tried to meddle with her,
and ready to fight to the death if they would not
heed the cry. And such a man, from Palmerston
onward — and backward too, for the matter of that —
has always appealed to the British spirit, were he
right or were he wrong.
So Chamberlain's was a name to raise a cheer in
any popular assembly, and none could say how far
he was likely to go. Some measure of the expecta
tions formed of him may be gathered from the success
of that caricature in which Arthur Balfour, his chief,
was represented in form of the dog at the mouth of
the gramophone listening to "his master's" — that
is, to Chamberlain's — " voice." It was a very com
mon belief that Arthur Balfour, of indolence and in
difference rather than of any actual weakness, allowed
Chamberlain to call the tune, though sometimes
it did not accord with the nominal leader's idea of
harmony. He was regarded as the " strong man."
And then, in a moment, a lamentable accident in,
or from, a hansom, robbed him of his effective strength.
By a curious chance I happened to be an eyewitness.
I was walking with my brother up Whitehall, and
just as we passed the Scotch Office a hansom overtook
us, and as it came abreast of us the horse fell, the
doors appeared to fly open and the occupant of the
hansom was forcibly shot forward over the horse's
loins and came head-foremost on the road. There
were many passers-by, and even before we could
reach the fallen man and horse they were surrounded.
We were hurrying to keep an appointment, there were
more than enough willing hands to help, and we went
on. Of course we had not had time nor a sufficient
clear view of the face to recognise the victim of the
accident. It was only some hours later, when we

62 JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
read the evening papers, that we understood that it
was Mr. Chamberlain whom we had seen thus
grievously projected into the roadway. I remember
that there was a large triumphal arch, of corn sheaves
and the like, erected in the roadway as a triumphal
exhibition of Colonial produce, and it was suggested
that the horse, by shying at this edifice, had caused
the accident to the great Colonial Secretary. Whether
that were so or not, it soon became apparent that
the shock suffered by Mr. Chamberlain was far more
severe than either he or any one else realised at the
time. At first he treated it lightly, as a man of his
courage and resolution would. He was cut about
the head, and it was thought that this was done by
the shutter falling on his head as the cab came down:
This was the driver's view of the cut, but it was pure
speculation. When the horse was on the very point
of falling to its knees, the hansom driver on his high
perch would be otherwise engaged than in looking
down through his trap-door to see that all was well
with his " fare." Those cuts and blows, as I rather
think, were inflicted by the stony roadway as the
unfortunate victim's head came forcibly against it.
There is no difficulty in accounting for them.
The accident did not immediately drive Mr.
Chamberlain from his activities. All his life long he
had been something more than a passive resister
to the advice of his doctors. His principal form of
exercise had been the puffing of big cigars. Even now
he was very long in acquiescing in the conviction
that he could no longer take his place in the political
arena. With unabated courage and cheerfulness he
faced the truth which he was gradually driven to
recognise as inevitable. He still had many months
of life before him, but even before his comparatively
early death his name became an honoured memory
rather than a living force.

CHAPTER VII
SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
WHEN Mr. Gladstone started on his ad
venture along the paths of Irish Home
Rule, and thus tried beyond the breaking
point the fidelity of so many of his
followers, there were two, at least, of his chief lieu
tenants who remained staunch : Mr. Morley, now
Viscount Morley, and Sir William Vernon Harcourt.
With Sir William Harcourt I had first made ac
quaintance at a most disrespectful distance in the
very early days of the Eighties, when I was an Oxford
undergraduate. Sir William was member for Oxford
— for the Borough, not the University — and on
appointment to the office of Home Secretary sought
re-election. His opponent was Mr. Hall, the brewer.
We — that is to say, myself and other voteless and
graceless undergraduates — deemed it our bounden
duty to attend Sir William's meetings. We styled
ourselves in those days " Conservatives and sports
men," and thought it only right to bear witness to
the faith that was in us by interrupting the candidate
at the least opportune moments of his speech by
derisive howls and cheers. Owing in the main, as
we doubted not, to these our statesman-like efforts,
Sir William was rejected by Oxford town, and Mr.
Hall was elected in his stead. In a short while,
however, he was fitted with a seat where our influence
could not prevail, and came into office as Home
Secretary at the beginning of this period.
63

64 SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
The contrast between the two faithful lieutenants
was rather striking. Their fidelity to the great
chieftain was the one and only characteristic which
they seemed to have in common. It is not my busi
ness to attempt a sketch of Lord Morley, who is still
with us, who did what I judge to be the best of his
political work, in India, after this date, and perhaps,
in the monumental life of Mr. Gladstone, his greatest
literary work also. During the first half of the
Eighties he did not hold office ; indeed, it was not
until 1883 that he entered Parliament at all. And
in the Parliament of 1886 he was appointed to the
then especially important office of Chief Secretary
for Ireland, only to be set down, together with all
the rest of the Gladstonians, by the General Election
following the rejection of the Home Rule Bill ; there
fore it might seem as though he could scarcely count
for much in these years. Yet, in point of fact, there
is no doubt that he counted for a very great deal,
and had so counted for some time before he appeared
in person in the forefront of the battle.
Although there was one side, the religious, in which
he stood as far apart as well could be from Mr.
Gladstone, yet in all other respects — as in his firm
adherence to principle, his earnestness of purpose,
his democratic trend, and his love of the best in
literature — his character and line of thought were
very much in harmony with those of his leader, and
exactly such as would commend themselves and their
possessor to that leader's attention and respect.
There can be no question about the respect and
attention paid by Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Morley,
and it is likely enough that his policy at that time was
coloured more than he knew by Mr. Morley's influence.
It is tolerably certain that although the " flying of
the Home Rule kite," as it was called, took by surprise
a large number of Mr. Gladstone's close friends, it

SIR W. V. HARCOURT.

64]

MR. MORLEY'S INFLUENCE 65
came as no surprise to Mr. Morley. Indeed, it is
more than hinted that the idea was introduced as a
piece of, we will not say practical, but may at least
say possible, politics to Mr. Gladstone by Mr. Morley.
Conceivably it may have risen out of conversations
between them, the one contributing perhaps even he
himself hardly knew just what quickening impulse
as interchange of ideas went on. This is the manner,
at all events, in which many events, both in politics
and other human affairs, come to the birth, with little
clear knowledge on the part of the parents of their
children. And if Mr. Morley had this influence, which there
is very much reason to think that he exercised, over
Mr. Gladstone, there is at least equal reason to suppose
that he influenced Sir William Harcourt as much, or
more. That is why, though I abjured all intent of
attempting a sketch of Mr. Morley, I have so far tried
to shadow in what I believe to be his very considerable
part in determining Mr. Gladstone in his attitude
towards Home Rule. It is an influence which we are
obliged to take into the reckoning, if we are to estimate
aright Sir William Harcourt's attitude, not only to
this but also to other problems, such as the Egyptian
question, which came into prominence both while
Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister and also while
he was in opposition.
Never, as aforesaid, save in respect of fidelity to
the chief, could two lieutenants be less alike. Sir
William Harcourt was of patrician race. He had the
blood of kings mingling with the stock at some remote
period, and a very innocent pride, which he is supposed
to have assumed as a consequence of that tributary
stream of purple, was made the target of some sly
derision by his opponents — occasionally, also, by his
friends. And his opponents were many. This scion of high
5

66 SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
race could, and did, personate to the full Rudyard
Kipling's ideal of " the first-rate fighting man."
He played the role of a civilised " Fuzzy Wuzzy " to
perfection. Not only was he in fact a fighting man,
but he also looked it. As he stood there, a tall,
full-bodied figure, with head thrown back and chest
well forward, he seemed to be saying to all and sundry,
" Come on, I'm ready for you." And he always was.
He was built on almost Herculean lines, and the
weapon that he wielded was something like an in
tellectual club of Hercules. It was a bludgeoning
instrument of force and weight, rather than any fine
rapier to be delivered with a mere wrist-turn. Sir
William Harcourt's were great body blows. But,
heavy as they were, he could deal them with a wonder
ful agility. He was a quick debater, and though his
retort would not be subtle it would be instantly
delivered. He gave the opponent no respite. He
had acquired and practised an incisive literary style
in articles contributed to the Saturday Review, and
later had written weightily and with large knowledge
in the Times over the signature of " Historicus."
So he had his vocabulary at command, although, to
say truth, his writing was always far more scholarly
and finished than his speech.
Thus he was a very able and forceful squire, and did
more than yeoman's service ; yet, at the same time,
his method had all the defects of its qualities. He
could knock down foes, but he was no adept in the
gentle, yet sometimes far more valuable, art of making
friends. He was in truth rather a dangerous ally,
although so powerful. He was, I believe, a very
kindly natured man, and yet he always seemed
singularly insensitive to the pain and offence that his
hard words could not fail to give. It appeared to
come quite as a surprise to him, and as yet further
incentive to wrathful indignation, that people should

HIS MERITS AS AN ALLY 67
be pained and offended by anything that he might
say. And this was the more curious because he him
self was very far from callous to the pin-pricks of
criticism. A pin-prick gave far more offence to his
own sensitive pride than any offence that it seemed
to him at all reasonable for one of the victims of his
own attack to feel under a hurricane of his cudgel-
blows. He would rage away at others, and expect
them to accept it all in very good part and be all the
better for it, but could not endure with any equa
nimity one tithe of the like chastening from the rod
which he deemed that they ought to kiss with gladness.
Somewhere, in spite of his great courage and in
tellectual gifts far above the common, there seemed
to be in him — was it a lack of sympathy ? — at all
events it was an almost absolute lack of ability to
look at a question from any other point of view than
his own, or to realise that there could be another point
of view which a rational man might hold. When
a man did put forward an opinion differing from his,
it never seems to have occurred to him to weigh that
opinion and see whether, by any possibility, it could
have validity. What he did was to scold at the man
and to treat him as an unreasonable and a naughty
child for the criminal folly of holding a view which
was not exactly that of Sir William Vernon Harcourt.
In the circumstances of the Liberal Party at that
moment — by which I mean the moment of Mr.
Gladstone's divergence from the recognised highway
and plunge into the debatable country of Home Rule
— it has always seemed to me a little doubtful whether
Sir William's championship was really of more service
or dis-service to the cause. He was a most valuable
man, of course, for demolishing the argument of an
opponent. That was his great asset. He knew no
fear ; and not only were some opponents' arguments
bludgeoned out of being, but many an opponent

68 SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
refrained, in fear of the prospective bludgeoning,
from bringing his argument to the birth at all. In
such service as this no other man could be of equal
use, perhaps, with Sir William. But then, just at
this anxious and doubtful moment, neither the merits
nor the probable issues of the political conflict were
obvious to men's eyes ; there was no clear and clean-
cut division between those who were for the great
chieftain, Home Rule and all, and those who felt
constrained, not without pain and grief, to break
their unspoken vows of homage if the maintenance
of those vows had to involve them in support of the
new policy. Thus there were many standing at the
parting of the ways, anxiously debating which of
the paths they should take. A relatively small
weight thrown into the balance on this side or that is
enough to decide the minds of men so hesitating.
When you have a person standing thus at the
cross-roads, and you desire to have him follow you
down one of them, it is really not the best possible
means of persuasion to scold him violently for being
such a donkey as to hesitate at all. The result of
that is rather apt to be his bolting at full gallop down
the other road.
Yet this, or something very like it, is the means
that Sir William Harcourt was rather disposed to
adopt with any waverers. He could not understand
how they could waver, and he told them so, very
clearly indeed : more clearly and forcibly perhaps than
he realised, certainly more forcibly than they were
likely to relish. The consequence was that many a
waverer went over, " stock, lock, and barrel," to the
enemy's ranks, whom a more gentle and conciliatory
wooing might have rallied to Sir William's and his
chief's support. But the practice of any arts of
conciliation was apparently impossible to him. He
behaved as if scarcely realising that such arts existed,

LORD ROSEBERY PREFERRED TO HIM 69
or had any value. Thus it was that he was so useful
a fighting man in face of an avowed foe, but of no use
whatever, and perhaps somewhat worse than useless,
for the at least equally valuable purpose of gaining
friends. It is probable that he went through life in
perfect unconsciousness of this disability. It is
probable that it was the chief reason why, after the
passing from the scene of the great chief, the mantle
of leadership fell not upon his shoulders but on those
of Lord Rosebery, preferred before him. It is certain
that he was both vexed and genuinely surprised at
this preference. He would not have been thus
surprised, though he might have been no less vexed,
had he only had a little clearer insight into his own
qualities, and into the effect that they had in their
forceful but unsympathetic reaction on other men.
He did not seem at all able to appreciate why his
influence was not greater ; for while he was fully able
to realise his force, he failed to realise his lack of those
persuasions which may often achieve more than
force. The result, when Lord Rosebery was made
Premier, was not a little pathetic. Sir William had
given far more service to the party, yet the party
overlooked his claim and chose another as its leader.
Nobody whose judgment was worth considering
ever doubted for a moment Sir William's essential
honesty in political life ; at the same time no one
could ever claim for him convictions and purpose of
a temperature at all approaching that of the burning
earnestness which fired Mr. Gladstone. For all the
energy of his speech, political and moral questions
did not present themselves to Sir William's mind as
being of that supreme and all-engrossing importance
which they assumed with Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Morley,
in his own way, which gave less impression of the glow
ing warmth that the eloquence of the great leader could
not fail to kindle, nevertheless convinced men of his

70 SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
seriousness of purpose as Sir William, who protested
so much more vehemently, never could convince them.
The " full-dress " history of those times remains
to be written, in spite of the eminent contributions
already made towards it by such volumes as Mr.
McCarthy's History of our own Times and Mr. Morley's
own Life of Gladstone. But as those contributions
fall in, they supply a growing mass of testimony to
the immense influence of Mr. Morley on the views both
of Mr. Gladstone and of Sir William Harcourt. It is
testimony which is received with some surprise ;
it is an influence which was not appreciated by
politicians generally at the time that it was being
exerted ; it is very likely that it was not at all fully
recognised by those who benefited by it (or suffered
under it, as you prefer) ; that is to say, by Mr. Glad
stone or Sir William Harcourt themselves. It is
possible that one man only, Mr. Morley, quite realised
it. That he would be fully conscious of his share there
can, as I think, be little question. He was (happily,
we may say he is) a very clear-sighted man. He
was very sensitive, to the point of nervousness, in
public, and it was therefore difficult for him to make
a forcible impression on a large audience. But in
spite of that difficulty and that nervousness he was
not at all disposed to underrate his abilities nor to
doubt his judgment and the accuracy of his opinions.
Although he was such a delightful and even brilliant
writer, with so copious a vocabulary ready to his hand,
yet his nervousness and ill-delivery made his speeches
sound as though they could scarcely be the product
of the same fine brain as that which had created some
of the passages in his books. It is true that the
speeches " read better than they sounded," to use
the commonplace, but still they did not read like
his writings. Nevertheless, in spite of his disability

MR. GLADSTONE'S YOUTH OF MIND 71
to give forceful utterance to his views in public, he
was never in any such difficulty in private conversa
tion. There he could be incisive, clear, and very
insistent. He could be the more insistent just because
he was so very quiet. A man of noisier speech could
not have penetrated your mind by reiteration, under
different forms and from different points of attack,
of the same argument. A noisier man would have
aroused irritation at the reiteration, and would
very soon have been unbearable. But it was part
of Mr. Morley's strength to be so quiet that he could
say the same thing again and again, dressing it up
in different verbal raiment, so that you did not
recognise it too immediately and so grow surfeited
with it. And by this reiteration the argument gained,
in time, perhaps without the full consciousness of
those who came under its power, a singular effect.
It was a process of peaceful penetration. If we
regard carefully the mind of Mr. Gladstone in its
changing points of view towards the Egyptian
question, towards Home Rule, and towards several
other salient political problems of the time, we may
see, as I believe, that it was gradually turned and
influenced by Mr. Morley : turned towards the opinions
which were constant and native to Mr. Morley's mind,
so that in some degree it is true to say that he was
the leader of his chief. When I write of Mr. Gladstone
changing his point of view I am not venturing on an
unfavourable criticism. The mind that is incapable
of change on political questions is far more open to
blame. It was part of the reason why Mr. Gladstone
kept both the youthful vigour of his mind and also
his firm hold on his party, so very long and under
such hard stress, that it was a mind which did not
grow rigid with age, but remained ever open to new
ideas. And as we may see Mr. Gladstone gradually pene-

72 SIR WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT
trated by the unobtrusive, unhurrying, but unresting
influence of Mr. Morley, so too we see Sir William.
We find him, an heir to great aristocratic traditions,
gradually absorbing and assimilating views about
the democracy at home, and also about foreign peoples,
which were imbued with colours that his own mind
never would have given them. He presents, in fact,
a very curious figure, and a figure, as I have hinted,
that, for all its pugnacity, was not without its pathos.
For undoubtedly he was in the end, to himself,
something of a disappointment and a failure ; some
thing of a puzzle, too, because he could not understand
why it was that his party did not either esteem him
more highly or love him better. Really, as we have
to suppose, it was their affection far more than their
esteem that he had failed to gain. And yet he had
qualities to merit affection equally with esteem. It
was his misfortune that he failed, owing to a defect
of insight and sympathy far more than to any lack
of kindliness, in earning his due credit for them. It
was that which made the failure pathetic — that it
was the failure to win hearts of a man kindly enough
at heart himself to wish to win them, and genuinely
puzzled, as well as sharply disappointed, by the
failure.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
I SCARCELY know another man whose physi
ognomy was so distinctly and so queerly ex
pressive of a distinct and queer personality
as Henry Labouchere's. He must have been
a very dull and uninterested student of human
faces who would not say to himself, looking for
the first time at Labouchere, " I wonder ! " If he
did not know the man, his wonder would be " who
that man is ? — what his face means ? " If he did
know the man, and thousands who had not seen his
face knew him in the wider sense of reading him and
reading of him, then perhaps he would be yet more
interested, saying to himself, " That face reveals the
man." And so it did. It was a perfectly honest face,
so far. But did it reveal a perfectly honest man ?
That was the question which a great many were
constantly asking. I do not mean that there was
any possible question of honesty (or should we say
of dishonesty ?) in the petty, pocket-picking, financial
sense. That was quite out of the question. But
what was very much in the question, and of its very
essence and point, was whether one could trust the
man politically. And that was a question which
those enigmatic features of his certainly did not help
to answer. It was a baffling countenance to him who
would study it and try to read the soul behind it.
It was a question which his record did not answer,
neither did you find any solution in his writings, his
73

74 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
speeches, nor in his vivid but not revealing conversa
tion. And I think that the truth of the matter, the
root of the riddle, is that in reality Labouchere did
not know, and therefore could not really trust, himself.
I never knew a man who seemed to have so little
principle to guide him. You may say of him that
he went through life without a guiding principle at
all. We have met many who seem to take a foolish
pride in professing a cynic absence of principle,
but in Labouchere 's case I believe that it was per
fectly sincere. It had been left out of him. He
was a singularly " a-mofal " man. Mores, custom,
opinion of his fellow-men, had as little influence over
him as any guiding principle of a higher kind such
as most men seek and find and accept with conscious
gratitude. All this reads, I know, like the portraiture of an
unpleasant, perhaps of an evil person ; but Labou
chere was in reality a particularly agreeable person,
his conversation was never dull and had often a really
witty turn ; and not only did his lack of principle
not lead him into ways of evil, but there are very
few men who have done so much active good in their
generation. " Labby," as all the world called him, whether
they knew him or not, was the Labby who was the
terror of one or two Ministries. They never knew
what to do with him, nor what he would do and say
next. As early as Mr. Gladstone's administration of
1886 he was mentioned as a possible member of the
Government, and in 1892, Mr. Gladstone's last term
of office, the question of his inclusion became acute.
He was likely to be a thorn in the side of any Ministry
which he entered. But on the other hand, would he
not give even more mischievous and Puckish prods
as a free-lance from without the pale if he were
excluded ? That was the problem, finally answered

HENRY LABOUCHERE-

74]

" LABBY OF TRUTH " 75
by his rejection. Inevitably he took his revenge in
the form of an article in Truth, criticising the qualities
of the Cabinet in a manner which certainly did not
err on the side of reticence ; but after this outburst,
with a respect, quite out of keeping with his usual
character, for the courage of Mr. Gladstone thus
taking office at such an advanced age, he behaved
himself quite decently and stung certainly not at all
more fiercely and persistently than was to be expected
of him. But besides this Parliamentary Labby, who
was perhaps the Labby best and most generally
known, we must never forget that he was " Labby
of Truth " also.
I cannot think that people did, or ever have done,
" Labby of Truth " adequate justice. When the
paper first came out it was thought to be a most
impertinent paper. So it was. Henry Labouchere,
its editor, its owner, and its financier, was a most
impertinent man. He was far past praying for on
that account. There was no man who liked better
to go prying into other men's affairs, or cared less
or was more unabashed when he was found out.
It was impossible to abash him : that was one of his
qualities, and almost his most striking. So when
Truth came out with its impertinences and personali
ties, which were new features in journalism at that
time, we all said what a horrid paper it was. Of
course those personalities would be nothing accounted
of now, when everybody seems to like reading of their
most intimate doings and mis-doings blazoned on the
front page of some daily paper. There was already
one paper which had launched out a little way into
that kind of brackish water : that was the World, with
Edmund Yates at its helm. Labby went one, or
more than one, better than Yates, pushed farther out,
into brinier seas, was a little more impertinent and
personal. We had all liked the personal and im-

76 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
pertinent World, though we had all said it was " a
horrid paper." So when there came this yet more
personal and yet more impertinent Truth we liked
that eVen better than the World, saying that it was
" even horrider." Of course Yates, in the old World,
had protesting digs at the impertinences of its new
rival Truth, and of course Labby, in Truth, dug back.
It was said that the paper took for its motto, " I am
Truth, and I am come to give the World the lie." It
did give the World the lie, and the World gave it back
again, and the readers of both were amused and
neither was one penny the worse.
So that was all right, and did not matter one way
or the other, but what did matter, and what is to be
accounted to Henry Labouchere as a very large
measure of righteousness, is that so soon as he had
established his paper firmly on its feet by these rather
dubious methods he set out to kick from that basis,
so established, and kick he did, furiously and most
effectively, at all sorts and conditions of wickedness
in places both high and low. When one sees him at
these virtuous activities, I think that we must pause
again and take a glimpse of the man as a whole or we
shall have his personality posing before us in a false
and side-illumined light. I hardly believe, knowing
the man he was, that it was for virtue's sacred sake
that he kicked with this fury at all wickedness : I
believe it was far more for the very fun of kicking.
From his heart he enjoyed a fight. I believe that he
would sooner fight a bad man, so as to try to make him
better, than a good man ; but he would sooner fight
a good man than not fight at all. And then he had
a heart. If he had not a principle, he had a heart,
and that is perhaps a better thing ; and into this kind
heart of him it pierced poignantly that such things
could be allowed to go on as the robbing of the widow,
the orphan, the poor clergyman, or the guileless retired

" THE BUMP OF VENERATION " 77
officer, for the benefit of the iniquitous Company
promoter. It is the great and redeeming merit of
Truth, a merit that never, in my humble judgment,
has been credited to it at anything approaching a
right estimate, that no sooner did it hear of any
swindle of the kind than forthwith it " went for it "
with an unrelenting and vituperative attack which
seldom failed to scotch the snake if it did not kill
him outright. And of course it was Labby really,
as we all knew, who was the St. George of these
dragon - slaying ventures. They demanded, not
merely for their success, but even for their initial
undertaking, a perfect fearlessness and a deep purse.
Labouchere had the first by nature and the second by
ironical fate, which made him heir to the rich and
crustedly Conservative Lord Taunton. It was a
special source of amused gratification to the inheritor
that his reversion should have been in the temporary
keeping of a peer of such respectability whom he had
loved to shock by his Radical vagaries. I suppose
that if a phrenologist had examined the skull of
Labouchere he would have found a profound pit in
the place where the bump of veneration is due on the
normal head, and a similarly deep cavity should have
been observed on the cranium of that other statesman,
his contemporary and in some mental aspects so like
him, Lord Randolph Churchill. At least, if that
science could not discover such depressions, it must
stand discredited by the very failure. From the first
Labouchere was incorrigible. When sent, in his early
days, to Italy with important dispatches of State,
he did not arrive at his destination : no news could
be heard of him, nor of his dispatches. At last, after
a week's interval, his address was discovered — Monte
Carlo 1 The tables had every attraction for his
sportive temperament. Recrimination and expostu
lation, in the most severe language known to

78 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
diplomatic courtesy, were sent after him ; to which
he replied, by telegram, that he much regretted the
delay in delivering the dispatches, but that the pay
of a Queen's Messenger was so very meagre that he
had been obliged to walk all the way, and Monte
Carlo was as far as he had been able to get in the time.
This is a digression — as Labouchere himself
digressed from the straight road to Rome — but once
he got on the trail of one of the Company promoting
swindlers he never digressed from that path of
vengeance. He must have been a real terror to those
gentry. He himself had a good knowledge of Com
pany business to start with — that was a useful asset
in dealing with the people who were financially queer.
I remember that at one time he was Chairman of the
Westminster Aquarium Board, which was not
managed to the satisfaction of the shareholders, and
they elected another very singular, though much less
known man, Captain Molesworth, R.N., to its Chair
in Labouchere 's stead. Labouchere knew the ways
of the tricksters ; he could perfectly well afford the
costs of a libel action, if they had the courage or the
character to bring one against him, and of an adverse
verdict, if they should happen to obtain one. But in
point of fact he knew his quarry too well to be often
in danger of any reprisal. Seldom had they either
courage, character, or money to come into Court.
Also, even an adverse verdict did not mean a total loss
to Truth, because of the value of the advertisement
given the paper by the action. I think that he
rather liked being in the Courts. Certainly it never
troubled him a whit. It is difficult to imagine any
situation which would. He carried insouciance to
a fine art. In one of the many legal actions in which
he was engaged occasion arose to say something about
his banking account, and then it came out that he
had left his pass-book lying at his bank, without

THE GOOD WORK OF TRUTH 79
taking the trouble to inquire how his account stood,
for something like five years — a model client for any
banking establishment ! A man so indifferent to the
money issue as this heedlessness indicates, so in
different, also, to any threat or abuse or opinion by
his fellow man, must have been a dreadful lion in the
path of the promoting hyena. We know, or at least
by looking up the record of past years of Truth we
might discover, how many insanitary swindles he
brought to the purifying light of day. But we should
make a very great mistake and a very insufficient
calculation if we were to take that as the measure
of the frauds that he was useful in suppressing. To
that positive number we must add all that x —
the unknown quantity — of similar frauds which died
still-born, which did not dare to come to the birth,
just because their would-be perpetrators knew that
this lion was here, couchant, ready to spring if they
should show themselves out of the dark places in
which they concocted their schemes. We must add
the two together, the known with the very much
larger number of the unknown, in order to estimate
at all truly the swindles that " Labby of Truth "
was the means of preventing, or of checking, and the
numbers of unfortunate poor and guileless people
whom he thereby saved from very dire straits. Never,
as I think, has nearly enough honour been done
Henry Labouchere for his good work in this respect.
It is easy to say that it was done in the first place in
the interests of his paper. Very likely. But at all
events, whatever the immediate motive, done it was,
and it was work well worth the doing, for which many,
without in the least suspecting it, have cause for
gratitude. If there were more papers of the fearless
ness in exposure of financial scandals and frauds which
was the characteristic of " Labby 's Truth," the
world would be financially cleaner than it is.

80 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
Labouchere can very well afford to rest his claim
to fair fame — not that it was a claim he would ever
have urged — on that. He had no great legislative
measure to his credit, long as he was in Parliament.
On the whole we may certainly say that he was on
the side of the angels ; that is, of the Radicals, for
we are fallen on days when all that is Radical is rated
angelic, and vice versa. He was one of those who
helped to set the train running along democratic
lines which have led to a station, by no means yet a
terminus, such as few of the initiators of the move
ment imagined, and fewer still would have desired.
For such legislative progress as he set his hand to,
the democratic powers of to-day may thank him.
He was also one of those Englishmen, partly by reason
of his Gallic extraction, who helped to make possible
that Anglo-French entente which has saved the world
to-day, for he was at home in Paris as few Englishmen
are or can be, and helped to show Frenchmen that the
differences of the nations which the Channel divided
were not beyond reconcilement. Thus do men now
and then build better than they know. Among his
contemporaries Labouchere was most appreciated,
as many have told me, in the House of Commons
smoking-room, when one never knew with what quip
or unexpected turn he might brighten up the talk.
" What, another Bung got a Beerage," was his
comment when a good brewer was awarded a title
worthy alike of his excellent work for his party and
of his ale. That is only a sample. No doubt a
Parliamentarian of his time and party could give us
many much better, but it is fairly typical of the
quaint, humorous, school-boyish, irreverent whimsies
which he would flash out with a grim smile, concealed
under the beard but revealed by a queer lift of the
corners of the eyes under the shaggy brows.
The actual value of the work that he did as a

" LENIN AND TROTSKY " 81
legislator was probably as nothing in comparison
with his yeoman service as a swindler-hunter in the
pages of his paper ; still it had points on which another
man might very well hang himself little votive offer
ings for his own fame. He had already been twice
in Parliament for short periods, when he was returned
at the General Election of 1880, but had made no
name, had taken no prominent line. And at this
General Election he found himself as one of the two
members for Northampton, in double harness with
a queerer colleague, in the opinion of the majority
of the House, even than himself, to wit Mr. Bradlaugh.
Labouchere came to Westminster with the views —
so far as he held, and averred himself as the holder of,
settled views at all — of an advanced Radical : ad
vanced, and Radical, be it understood, according
to the standard of the day. These standards change.
It was just about this time that the popular novelist,
Miss Broughton, wittily expressed herself in respect
to the change of view which the passage of years had
brought towards her own books. There was a day
when she had been regarded as somewhat daring,
when there was question whether the Victorian young
person ought to read her, but now  ! " When
I began to write," she said, " I was regarded as a
Zola : now I am looked on as a Charlotte M.
Yonge." I think she rather regretted her lost claim
to shock.
Similarly, Labouchere, were he living, might well
say of himself, and possibly might so speak of his
yoke-fellow of Northampton, Bradlaugh, also : " We
used to be regarded as Lenin and Trotsky ; now we
are looked upon as Lord Selborne and Walter
Long." Though they thus came in together, representing
the same constituency and to some extent the same
ostensible shade of political opinion, and though
6

82 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
they had this, at least, in common, that neither cared
greatly for the opinion of the respectable citizen, still
no two men could well be much farther apart in their
mental character. Bradlaugh — I must speak of the
man only as I had very small opportunities of judging
of him — was full of honest convictions, very much in
earnest. The last thing of which Labouchere realised
the importance was " the importance of being earnest."
That admirable comedy was already, in all probability,
on the stocks, or at all events simmering in the greatly
gifted brain of the writer, but Labouchere had not yet
the opportunity of learning its moral, if it had any to
convey. Bradlaugh shocked the House far more
severely than Labouchere ; he even animated the
usually decorous proceedings by physical violence in
resisting his removal from those high portals. He
declined, in the first instance, to " kiss the book."
And I believe that he did it all from conviction that it
was a duty, a duty owed to truth and honesty, which
he put far above any owed to decency or decorum.
These last were gods to whom Labouchere likewise
was quite indifferent, but, unlike Bradlaugh, he was
indifferent to those other gods also — parcus deorum
cultor, no matter what the attributes of the divinities.
Bradlaugh endured a great deal of personal physical
inconvenience, rather than acquiesce in what he
thought wrong. Labouchere had no such decided
views of right or wrong as to deem the suffering of
inconvenience for their sake to be worth while. So,
at least, I judge of the two.
Many people were deceived, as I am obliged to
think, in this respect, about Labouchere. They
would say: " Oh, it is all put on, this cynicism, this
indifference. It must be so. Underneath it all he is
very much in earnest. Unless he were in earnest
he would not run such risks as he does in his attacks
on the Company promoters and the like. He con-

CHARLES BRADLAUGH.

82]

BRADLAUGH AT THE BAR 83
tinually stands to lose money by the libel suits they
bring ; and of course he gets nothing if he wins."
But, thus arguing, they were surely judging
Labouchere by themselves ; and surely Labouchere
was, just in this, different from them and not to be
judged by the common standard. He had more
money than he needed, and he was sufficiently capable
of detachment from the folly common to most men
of regarding money as an end in itself, instead of as
a means. Therefore the fact that he must stand to
be shot at, financially, in consequence of his fearless
exposures of frauds, left him quite unaffected. He
could not conceivably be mulcted in a penalty so
heavy as to compel him to any change in his comfort
able way of life. Moreover, the libel suits, as I have
noted, were by no means likely to be a clear loss, even
if they went against him. There was always the
compensating value of the advertisement for his
paper which the lawsuit brought, to set in the other
side of the balance. One would have to be very
conversant with journalistic finance to make anything
like a just estimate of that value, but surely it must
be considerable.
So we cannot accept his action in this regard as
much evidence of earnest purpose. Had it entailed
on him any personal inconvenience it would be evi
dence far more to the point, but there is no evidence
to show that he recognised any purpose in life which
would be worth a sacrifice. Bradlaugh, his colleague,
was cast in very different mould. The story of his
entry into Parliament, in this very first Ministry of
the Eighties, will not be forgotten. He presented
himself at the Bar of the House and demanded, quot
ing ancient statute to support his claim, to be allowed
to " affirm " his allegiance, since the form of oath
contained words meaningless and even offensive to
him.

84 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
Bradlaugh, it should be noted, did not belong to
that large class of unbelievers in Christian doctrine
who subscribe themselves " agnostic." There was
nothing of this pale, negative complexion about him.
He was nothing if not positive, aggressive, assertive.
He called himself, frankly, an atheist, and an addition
to that libel might well be made and he be called a
dogmatic atheist. Atheism is itself a negation which
hardly seems worth fighting for ; but that was not
Bradlaugh's view at all. He had fought for atheism,
he had lectured for atheism, he had made himself
the leader and spokesman of a group who followed
him along the paths of atheism — to no particular goal
that the ordinary man was able to recognise. It was
to most people a wonder that they should be in so
great earnest over a no-creed of the kind ; but
Bradlaugh himself would have said that it was not the
negative principle of atheism for which he contended,
but that his contention was against the positive prin
ciple of falsity which was contained in all religions.
Thus he would have claimed to justify himself.
But when he came to the Bar, and demanded to
affirm, he put the whole House in a quandary.
Speaker Brand, like Lord Hampden, did not know
what to do. He referred the matter to the House.
The House did not know what to do. It referred the
matter to a Committee. The Committee, after
examination of the statute on which Mr. Bradlaugh
rested his claim, said (by a majority of one vote, as
was stated) that he could not affirm. Meantime,
having paid his respect to all the gods of atheism by
the protest which he had made, Bradlaugh wrote
to the papers saying that he was now prepared to take
the oath, though it would mean no more to him than
a mere affirmation, and following this announcement
he came up to the Bar again, a day or two later, and
demanded to be sworn. Whereupon Sir Henry

THE VOTE OF EXCLUSION 85
Drummond Wolff, on the look out for trouble — •
that is to say, for any trouble which he, as a member
of the band of guerilla warriors then known as the
" Fourth Party," could cause the Government —
jumped up and objected to the swearing, under these
circumstances, of the new member.
From this arose argument and counter-argument ;
the original question became tangled up in devious
threads of subsidiary problems : Could an atheist
be allowed to take the oath ? Could a man who had
refused to take the oath once be allowed to swallow
it at a second venture? Could a man be allowed to
affirm if he refused the oath ? It was ostensibly
to discuss this last problem that a Select Committee
was at length appointed, on Mr. Gladstone's motion.
The Committee found that Mr. Bradlaugh could not
take the oath, but that he might affirm, if he cared
to do so on the understanding that the Committee's
finding did not hold him scatheless of any penalties
which might be imposed on him if any member brought
against him a successful suit for taking his seat and
voting in the House when he had no right so to do.
So, that recommendation coming before the House,
it was promptly rejected by a sufficient majority,
who probably voted, as usually happens, on a question
considerably wider than that which was actually
submitted to them. The vote, in Parliament and
out, is not strictly logical. Any question of law raised
by the Bradlaugh case had probably become merged,
in the minds of most of the members, in the more
general question which they would be subconsciously
putting to themselves in some such form as "Is a
fellow like this Bradlaugh fit to be a member of our so
honourable House ? " and, voting accordingly, they
decided on his exclusion.
It was easy to vote, but they found it not quite so
easy to exclude. Perhaps Bradlaugh conducted

86 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
himself with no great dignity, but certainly he
succeeded in making the proceedings in Parliament
appear highly undignified. He kept trying to make
a bolt for the Bar in order to snatch the Testament and
swear. Constables, like " full backs " guarding a
Rugby football goal, collared him as he ran in and
dragged him out again. An order was passed ex
pelling him from the very precincts. Violence, and
much of it, to the measure of ten strong policemen,
was needed to enforce it. Bradlaugh was a man of
gigantic strength and frame. He was self-educated,
had begun work as office-boy, proceeded to be a common
soldier, had some training in a lawyer's office ; that
is to say that he learnt self-reliance and something of
law and something of the use of very unusual thews
and sinews. He exercised the latter at the expense of
the ten policemen, but they were too many for him.
When he resigned himself, dishevelled, torn, and
bleeding, to their hands, he was quite friendly with
them, and the friendliness was mutual.
But he had already gained a hearing in the House.
After the vote excluding him, he was permitted to
state his case from the Bar, and stated it well, in a
powerful, far-carrying voice. The impression he
made on members was good, perhaps better than they
wished. They could not dislike the enormous man,
with his capacious brainy head and extraordinarily
long upper lip, who seemed like a Titan challenging
the worst that men or gods could do him. He was a
pathetic, at the same time as a tremendous figure. His
very vesture had a pathetic aspect, for this most
militant atheist was always garbed in the style of
dress and necktie that is generally worn by a Noncon
formist divine. But if members were thus attracted,
despite themselves, by his personality, they were firm
for his exclusion, none the less.
His constituents, of course, by reason of this

BRADLAUGH 'S ORATORY 87
exclusion, were the more determined that he should
represent them. He resigned his seat more than
once, but only to be re-elected. For the first six years
of the Eighties the Bradlaugh trouble was " something
chronic," as is said in the vulgar tongue. After the
General Election of 1885, the House met under
Speaker Peel, succeeding Speaker Brand, who had
retired to the Upper House, and Bradlaugh took the
oath which had no meaning for him without opposi
tion. Doubtless he was not the only member who
attached small importance to it, but none other had
cared to avow so aggressively their view of its
insignificance. Once they had admitted the dangerous lion into
their midst, the House did not find him roaring so
very furiously after all. He was a valuable, hard
working member. His oratory gained the com
mendation of such a master of the art as Mr. Gladstone
himself. The measure which he was most directly
responsible for passing, though I do not think it was
brought forward in his name, was that which now
permits any member who objects to take the oath to
make affirmation in its stead. Any affirming member
may now feel that he owes to Mr. Bradlaugh that he
is able to enter the House without making a more or
less painful compromise with his conscience.
Bradlaugh 's Parliamentary activities almost exactly
fill the decade, for he died at the beginning of 1891.
He was not sixty years of age, but his life had been
very hard and full of stress, and in spite of his great
physique it had worn him to pieces. Labouchere,
on the other hand, to whom life was by no means so
strenuous a business, went on into the twentieth
century. It was perhaps in Mr. Gladstone's brief
but stormy last administration in 1892 that he was
most often in the forefront of the battle. He was
a member of the Parliamentary Committee appointed

88 THE MEMBERS FOR NORTHAMPTON
in 1897 so inquire into the unfortunate " Jameson
Raid," as it was called. He was member for North
ampton for twenty-six years, from 1880 right on to
1906, but in his later age his enjoyment of a fight
grew less keen and he took a smaller share in party
politics.

CHAPTER IX
GENERAL GORDON
SINCE the execution of Charles I, the fate of
no one Briton has so profoundly stirred the
heart of the nation as the death of Gordon
at Khartoum. Nay, more ; while there was
a certain division of opinion about the former, a
section of the nation deeming it, if not an act of
justice, at least an act of necessity, there was no
such divided view about the latter, except it be that
while all saw it in the light of a disgraceful error, to
some it appeared a hideous crime.
Gordon, as circumstances have since made clear,
was sent to Khartoum at a time when it was morally
certain that, save for some special interposition of
Providence, he would not come back alive. The
circumstances, to us who read the records, have only
become clear since the event, but the Government of
the day had the most full opportunity of knowing
the circumstances : there can be no doubt that it
did know them. Yet it sent Gordon out. It is not at
all impossible, Gordon being the man that he was,
that he, who as we must think also knew the
circumstances, believed that the miraculous would
happen, believed that a special intervention of
Providence would occur, believed that he had been
divinely appointed as the instrument for relieving
the troops in Khartoum and would receive divine
help in achieving the task. It is quite possible that
he may have believed that. It is quite impossible,
89

90 GENERAL GORDON
however, to think that the British Government
believed it ; nevertheless, it sent him out.
It sent him out partly, no doubt, because the nation
was clamorous that he should be sent. They were
clamorous that something should be done to relieve
a situation that was unbearable to the national pride
and to the national sense of humanity. Therefore
they clamoured for Gordon. They did not know,
they had not the means of knowing, that the situa
tion had become worse than unbearable, that it was
already desperate, that sending any single man,
Gordon or another, to retrieve it was sending another
living man to join the number of those already lost.
The Government knew it ; but the Government
had not the courage to tell the nation how desperate
the situation was. They were in the dilemma of
being obliged either to tell the truth or to yield to the
clamour. They had not the courage to do the former,
therefore they had, perforce, to do the latter. They
sent out Gordon.
It is hardly the place here to dwell on the story of the
days that followed, the hopes, the fears, the expe
dition of Lord Wolseley, hurriedly despatched, carried
through by that very masterful and accomplished
soldier with a success, a speed, and a punctuality
that were marvellous in face of all the difficulties,
but arriving " just too late." " Just ' too late,"
as we were told ; but it is always open to more
than doubt whether they would have been in time
had they arrived days or even weeks earlier ; whether
the Mahdi had not the whole situation in hand
whenever he chose to stretch out the hand and grip
it ; whether he had not for weeks been playing the
game of cat and mouse — himself cat, Gordon mouse.
It looks much like it. A few weeks earlier might
have been " just too late " still. In any case, it
was soon realised that it was a failure that never had

$0@%bm

GENERAL GORDON'

90]

THE "ALL-RIVER ROUTE" 91
a chance of success, and the failure was not allowed
to stand between Lord Wolseley and the full recogni
tion 'of the ability with which the expedition was
planned and executed. I am quite aware that this
is a statement of the case which cannot go un
challenged. It is a matter of common knowledge
that General Stephenson, then in military command
in Egypt, was not in favour of the " all-river route,"
but of the overland way across the desert by Suakin
and Berber. Wolseley insisted on getting over the
habitants, whom he had proved so well in Canada,
and going all the way by the Nile. As the event
turned out it appears likely that time might have
been saved had the desert short-cut been taken.
That enough time could have been saved to save the
situation, even had the force been able to arrive in
full strength by the possibly earlier date, is scarcely
credible in view of the numbers that the Mahdi had
at his disposal. But whether Wolseley were right
or wrong in his choice of plan, none, I think, have
ventured to criticise the almost perfect execution
of the plan once chosen, and the full recognition of
the extraordinary ability with which the expedition
was planned and executed. The whole story is
poignantly alive still in the hearts of all of us who
knew it and who knew Gordon in the Eighties, when
it was enacted. It hardly enters, strictly speaking,
into the portraiture of Gordon, because we knew
him, for such as he was, more than ready to go
fearlessly to meet any fate which duty seemed to
point out to him, long before he proved it in this
final test. What does enter essentially into his
portraiture, and in itself virtually amounts to the
very sketching of the portrait, is the explanation of
the reason of the people's clamour, and their belief
that he was the man, and the one man, who could
do what we now know to have been the impossible.

92 GENERAL GORDON
What is very extraordinary is this kind of implicit
belief in him, which was not restricted to the British
race. Whenever any Government or Potentate was
in trouble with their people, or with an alien people,
it was their impulse to send for Gordon. Thus, the
Emperor of China sent for him to put down the
Taiping rebellion. This was the affair of the " ever-
Victorious Army," as it was called. Gordon did not
call it so, and the high-sounding name was not quite
earned. But he and that army gained victories
enough, at all costs, to achieve their end. The
rebellion was put down. The Emperor offered him
"up to half his kingdom " in the Oriental form of
statement, but Gordon would take nothing. The
Khedive was in trouble ; he invited Gordon into his
service. Gordon went. Then he returned home,
and desired to leave that service, but the Khedive
reminded him of his promise, and Gordon went back
again to the Egyptian business, but only on the
understanding that his own conditions were granted,
namely that he should be appointed Governor-
General over all the Soudan. He had to go to South
Africa, because there was trouble with the natives
and Boers there. Just at the beginning of the
Eighties, Leopold, King of the Belgians, was very
anxious to get him to go out to allay discontent
among the natives in the Congo, but for some reason
Gordon did not consent to that mission. In brief,
wherever trouble arose in any part of the world in
which white men were dealing with men of colour,
Gordon was sent for, or entreated ; and, more
wonderful still, this white man was summoned again
and again, as at the behest of the Emperor of China,
and again at the call of the Khedive, to help even
where it was coloured man against coloured man.
The record is quite amazing.
From the record we turn naturally to the reason,

HIS SIMPLICITY 93
and that reason must be discoverable, if at all, in
the character of the man. Its statement must be
his portrait. Perhaps, by way of outline, I may be
allowed to quote briefly from an article of my own
concerning Gordon, contributed to the Cornhill
Magazine of February 191 7 :
" There was about him a boyish, almost a childish,
simplicity and directness which gave him the power
of appealing very intimately to' a boy's mind and
heart." (Let me say, in parenthesis, that in this
simplicity and directness lay much of his power of
appeal to the minds of those people, rather more
primitive than the Western Europeans, whom the
Chinese Emperor or the ruler of Egypt might call
him in to help. They are perhaps on rather the same
plane as the boy of Western Europe.) " To me,
hardly more than a child, he would talk even then of
God and of Jesus Christ as if they were personal
friends whom we knew in common. He never had
the least sense of embarrassment in speaking of his
religion, and this perfect absence of self-consciousness
freed him from that very British shyness which makes
so many of us ashamed of exhibiting what is really
the finest in our thoughts and feelings. And by
virtue of this freedom from all self-consciousness
on his own part he was able to help others to throw
off their own reserves and to show forth the best that
they had in them. It was all, of course, but one
aspect of his utter fearlessness, demonstrating itself
thus on the moral side, as often, in other crises of his
strenuous life, in the face of physical peril — a very
great soldier and hero.
" It is wholly unnecessary — it would be little short
of an impertinence — for me to insist on that greatness
and heroism. The very name of Gordon can hardly
fail to suggest an incarnation of heroic virtues.

94 GENERAL GORDON
" There is, however, one side of his extraordinarily
complex character to which I would invite attention,
because I think that it has often been overlooked,
obscured by the more striking qualities — his hard-
headedness. He was R.E. — a sapper — primarily a
scientific soldier. Thereto he added, as he gave
frequent proof, a remarkable faculty of organisation
and administration, as well as a marvellous aptitude
for the leadership of men. With these intellectual
and moral gifts he was, withal, mystic and fighter —
a threefold combination very rare."
Elsewhere, in the same article, I wrote :
" Of his reason for doing this, or for not doing that,
he would say quite simply, ' God would wish it,' or
' God would not wish it.' It is a reason which any
one of us might confess to himself, intimately, but
it is a reason which we are shy — more's the pity ! — -
of admitting even to a friend. Far less would we
state it to the man in the street. But Gordon would ;
and in his absolute simplicity he could not see why
he should not."
And again :
" The most remarkable feature of Gordon's religious
belief is, I think, his intense faith in the personal
indwelling of God's spirit in the human soul. It is
the quality of faith commonly ascribed to the mystic ;
and to the mystic we commonly ascribe, as a usual
condition of his creed, the contemplative life. Here
and there, very exceptionally, in history we find such
faith in the soul of the man (or woman) of action.
And therewith, in their union, we have the hero-
saint. " Of this high company was Gordon — by virtue
of heroism and saintliness united, an inspired leader
of men. He could bend men to his will, and make

HIS FEARLESSNESS 95
them follow him, as very few have been able to in
fluence and guide them. But again, as just said,
he had, to complete an extraordinary personality,
the quality of penetrating scientific intellect. That
trinity of rare and precious gifts made him a man
• perhaps unique in human story. I, at least, am at
a loss, turning its pages, to find one just like him —
his equal in gifts so various and so rich."
So I wrote of him, and in what degree a reader
may find this at all explanatory of his character
I hardly know. It is a character extremely hard of
understanding by us who are ordinary men, because
he was such an extraordinary man. The ordinary
epithets cease to have their meaning when we try
to fit them to him. Thus it appears meaningless
to say of Gordon that he was " courageous," or
" brave," for courage and bravery assume something
fearful which is faced by the resolution of the will
of the brave man. But Gordon had no need of
courage, because for him the fearful thing did not
exist. He was fearless ; and when we say " without
fear," we say at the same time " without the occasion
for courage." I do not think that I exaggerate his
psychic outlook on things terrible to most men when
I affirm that he knew no fear of them. His life
was a strenuous one, indeed, yet he says again and
again in his letters how greatly he would prefer death ;
and although this is a statement which is rather
to be suspected on the lips of another, there is no
doubt, as I think, that it represented the truth that was
in Gordon's mind. He feared the possibility of long
drawn-out suffering, as who that is human and
sentient would not fear it ? In one of his letters he
writes : " I do not look on death as anything but
joy, and that intense joy ; but long and continued
bodily suffering is appalling. To die is only a

96 GENERAL GORDON
moment's agony, but a long weary life subdues us.
The sacrifice of a life is nothing, but the sacrifice of
a life's duration is that which we withdraw from."
In another letter he writes : " The archers wound me
sorely at times, and the infirmities of the flesh make me
desire death that I may be dissolved and at rest. Life
is no light penance, and yet we so often cling to it ! "
It is tolerably apparent that for a man who could
write like this and voice the very truth of his con
victions in such words, the " King of Terrors " must
be not only no more formidable than a bogey, but
actually the supreme benefactor. Armed with such
conviction he could not fear. To live, appeared to
him to need courage ; not to die.
Nor is it illogical, on these premises, that he should
not care at all for another man's opinion of him.
The conventions had no claim on him. It is recorded
of him, and I believe the story is quite true, that
once when he was in London the then Prince of Wales,
who was afterwards King Edward VII, " com
manded " him, as it is called, to dinner. To which
command Gordon sent back answer to the Equerry
that he hoped His Royal Highness would excuse him,
as he never dined out and always went to bed at nine
o'clock. After he had put down, or had wielded
the main hand in putting down, the Taiping rebellion,
the Emperor of China, after making him all those
offers of remuneration which he refused, finally sent
him a large gold medal. Gordon, because he was
afraid that looking at it might incite in him sentiments
of pride in the achievement, broke it up and distri
buted the pieces among his men.
If it be possible at all to realise such a man, a man
prompted by such motives, let us try to realise him
next on the way to Khartoum, sent out to perform
his impossible task; sent out under the direction of
Sir Evelyn Baring, who became Lord Cromer later.

(From a photograph by Dittrich, Cairo.)
LORD CROMER.

96]

TWO INCOMPATIBLES 97
Baring was a splendid official, administrator, and
organiser. What he did for Egypt seems impossible
to overrate. But he was an official all the while,
accustomed to say to this man " Go, and he goeth " ;
and the man to whom he had now to say " Go ; go
along the official rut as I have gone and as I order
you to go," was Gordon, a man such as I have feebly
tried to sketch him. And the last time Gordon had
gone to the Soudan he had gone as Governor-General !
I do not suppose there can be a doubt that Gordon
was not quite in a normal condition at the time.
Perhaps a man so extraordinary never could have
such an epithet as normal given him. Throughout
life he had believed himself directly and supernaturally
guided, as Socrates and many others have believed.
With such a belief, and with every disposition to
follow the supernatural rather than any official
guidance, it is ever a wonder to me how Gordon
remained a soldier. Probably he would not have so
remained in ordinary regimental work, but his record
shows him to have been free-lancing in some strange
quarter of the globe almost continuously after his
Crimean service. Sir Evelyn found him quite im
possible either to control or to comprehend. All the
way to Khartoum he kept sending telegrams, of
which the tenor of one would often contradict another.
Sir Evelyn more than hinted that he was drinking :
that alcohol was the disturbing cause. I do not
think there is a doubt that at this time Gordon was
taking a drug, but I question whether it was alcohol.
That matters little, however. Two more incom
patible men to work together could not easily be
found ; and they did not work together. Had they
been ever so harmonious, however, the result would
have been the same. The task of rescue of the
garrison was, humanly speaking, impossible, save
by some such expedition as that which the Govern-
7

98 GENERAL GORDON
ment sent out ultimately for Gordon's rescue. Had
that expedition started when Gordon started, with,
or instead of, Gordon, the situation and Gordon would
have been saved. But the sending of such an ex
pedition then would not have pleased the British
nation, and the Government was bent on pleasing the
nation. Instead of an equipped force it sent Gordon.
I have tried — I have found it very difficult — to
give some idea of the man who was Charles Gordon.
What I am totally unable to offer any explanation of,
or even to give any account of to myself, is the secret
of his influence over Oriental and African peoples.
When he was at home, stationed at Gravesend to
look after the forts along the Thames, he spent most
of his spare time visiting the poor, forming a boys'
club which was the beginning of the Gordon Boys'
Home, and so on. His influence over these people
was only a little less remarkable than over the
Easterns. One part of the secret of it, no doubt,
was, as I have said, his simple directness of speech
and act. He had a simple direct look in his eyes, too,
which spoke tacitly in the same sense.
And part of the secret, which the British Govern
ment would be wise to realise, since it has to bear
so large a share of the White Man's Burden, in
dealing with those who are not white, is that his
influence was due very largely to what is commonly
called prestige. Prestige, before it can be of use,
has first to be acquired, and Gordon's acquirement of
it was in China. He acquired it, perhaps, by his
direct methods, honesty, justice, and fearlessness.
Maybe we have had many political Gordons on the
way to acquire something like the same prestige,
but not living to take full value for it. Bullets used
to whistle around Gordon, but did not find him.
An ounce of lead six inches this way or that of the
course which it took, and all would have been finished ;

THE VALUE OF HIS DEATH 99
but that fatal six inches of aberration from its path
of destiny was not allowed. So we may ascribe this
ascendancy to what we please in the way of such
humdrum qualities as I have suggested above ;
we may say, at all events, that without such qualities
that ascendancy could not have been all it was ;
but when we have affirmed so much, we still have
to confess that the solution of the secret is not there.
It has escaped us. Others have dealt justly, honestly,
directly, and so forth with the nations under our rule,
and they have had their due reward ; but they were
not Gordons, and they have not had Gordon's reward.
Something there was at the back of all these which
Gordon had uniquely, and which we cannot catch
in any mesh of words. We may suggest some hint
of it perhaps when we say " personality." That
may serve as a suggestion : I am not professing it an
explanation. So Gordon went out, and he suffered the inevitable.
He suffered the fate which the British Government
should have known to be inevitable when they sent
him. Their sending him was a folly, and perhaps a
crime. But of almost all the ventures which Gordon
undertook and which, up to this last, he carried to a
successful issue, nearly the same might have been
said. In each instance it looked as if only by some
special Providence success could be wrought, and on
each occasion as if some special dispensation had been
vouchsafed. After all it is not wholly impossible
that there were those in the Cabinet who believed
that Gordon might be granted a peculiar portion of
the divine help.
We all know the tragic end ; but what all do not
realise is what that end has meant for our country.
It is generally amusing, as it is generally futile, to
speculate how the future would have gone had this
or that event happened otherwise. We may specu-

ioo GENERAL GORDON
late, if we please, on the fate of Egypt and of the
Soudan, and of Gordon, had Lord Wolseley's admir
ably planned and executed expedition arrived just
in time instead of just too late. But, whatever the
outcome of that speculation be, no matter how
glorious the merit that we ascribe to Gordon and how
prosperous the conditions that we imagine in those
countries of the Nile, we still can scarcely find in
all this a value to counterbalance the value of Gor
don's death happening as and when it did. We saw
him as a beacon : sorrowing, maybe, for the succour
which did not come, so that he might finish the work to
which he had set his hand (his attitude of thoughtful
sorrow is admirably expressed in Thornycroft's
statue of him in Trafalgar Square) ; we saw him as
a man of sorrow and disappointment, yet still saw him
as a beacon light, still heard him as a trumpet call, to
show and to sound the way of duty and self-sacrifice.
Under no other circumstance could the light have
shone so bright or the call have sounded so clear.
He filled the eye of a grieving and indignant people.
His example shone forth to us from the ramparts of
Khartoum, where we imagined him gazing, gazing,
weekly, daily, hourly, down the course of the ancient
river up which he vainly hoped to see the boats
ascending to his help. For thousands of people of
the English race that has been the vision glorious
which has inspired them, if not indeed to be Gordons,
to be, at least, their own best selves. We cannot
conceive that either longer life or another death
could have left him quite so glorious, quite so con
spicuous, quite so helpful to inspire us with something
of his own fearlessness of all the little terrors which
men have invented for their own undoing. For my
own part I often think, grievous as the pain of his
loss was, that I would not have it changed. Valuabje
above the life of other men though his life might be,

A MAN UNLIKE ALL OTHERS 101
I cannot conceive it more valuable than his death,
nor even conceive for him any other way of death
in which its value would have been the same.
He was a man of great friendships, and his loss was
widely as well as profoundly felt. But he was never
a social man in the sense of going to places where
society resorted. He would not dine out, and the
convenances would have bored him hugely, had he
allowed them the opportunity. But he did better
than that, for he never went where there was this risk.
His figure was no way remarkable, nor were his
features arresting : you would pass him in a crowd
and not notice him. Only when you had looked at
him more than once, the look that he would return
on you would remain with you. It was very direct
and searching, out of friendly but very shrewd eyes
of light grey iris. It was a good face, and a good-
looking face and a strong face, as you found when you
began to take stock of it ; but long before you had
done all this you were likely to be feeling rather
conscious that those eyes had already taken their
full account of your face and of much that lay behind
it. There was a hint of mesmerism about his power.
He did not say the pleasant things that would make
you happy, if he did not think them true. As I say,
he did not respect the convenances. Somehow he
gave out the idea of a rather terrible honesty and
sincerity ; terrible because it was almost a rebuke
to those whose sincerity was of the kind that serves
well enough in the world and is taken for what it is
worth. His sincerity was of quite a different standard,
and you felt it to be so.
History may give us men as great and as good as
Gordon ; possibly greater and better ; but this we may
say with confidence, that she does not give us another
man at all like Gordon. He was cast in a new mould,
and no second copy has been issued from it since.

CHAPTER X
LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS
THE brilliant soldier who had failed to relieve
and to retrieve Gordon received a Vis
county for his failure. He was already
a Baron.
It is to the credit of the Government and of the
nation that they could pass and approve this grant
of honour. The way of the world is too often to judge
every attempt by its failure or its success, and to
condemn or praise in accordance with the issue. In
this instance it showed exceptional clear sight and
liberality of judgment, for though this was an at
tempt that failed, the world perceived that the failure
was due to the impossibility of the end proposed.
The expedition itself was perfectly planned, perfectly
executed ; its commander and organiser really
deserved only the larger meed of honour from the
nation because he gained none of the honour which
would certainly have been his had the end been a
possible one with the means, and with the time, at
his disposal.
I think it was the one failure, if it is so to be cited,
in the whole long course of Lord Wolseley's career.
AH his other expeditions were triumphant successes,
for their aim, though often difficult, was at least
possible of achievement. The record is a very re
markable one.
Even in the very early days of his soldiering it
looks as if Wolseley had shown uncommon qualities.

EARLY TRAINING! 103
This was in the Crimea. He had gone out as an
infantry soldier ; he was soon selected to serve as
assistant in the work of the Royal Engineers.
The soldier who could think and who would apply
his brains to his profession was more rare in those
days than he is now. Wolseley gave such evidence
of this ability that he was immediately appointed
to a post connected with the transport and the dis
embarkation of troops.
If a young soldier was to learn something of trans
port and commissariat it is likely that there could
not be a much better, a much harder or a much more
painful school for him than he would find in that
Crimean campaign. Perhaps it is not for us, who
have perpetrated our own Mesopotamian campaign
(in its early stages) to say too much about the Staff
work, and especially about the commissariat and the
medical departments, in the Crimea, but it is quite
certain that young Wolseley must have had many
an object lesson there in what it was advisable to
avoid ; and it appears that he took the lessons to
heart and assimilated them.
He was naturally quick to learn. One could not
look at his alert, eager face and the open intelligent eye
and doubt it. He had some likeness to Charles
Wyndham, the actor, in the Eighties, though perhaps
it was due as much to his manner of wearing his
greyish hair, falling a little over the forehead, as to any
real resemblance of feature. But the aspect of
vivacity and of readiness to receive and respond to
an impression was common to the two men. They
were alike, too, in slight, active figure and in medium
height. After the Crimea it appears that Wolseley was
already a marked man. Wherever there was work
to do which required special organisation, and it is
seldom that this is not called for in the thousand

104 LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS
and one odd jobs around the ragged corners and edges
of our Empire, the authorities sent Wolseley to do it.
One of his qualities seems to have been a ready
confidence in his own ability to carry things through.
He was Irish born and bred, which may account for
some of that quality. In any case, an unbroken series
of surprising successes was soon to give it full warranty.
It was necessary, of course, that he must have further
years of qualifying experience first, before command
ing. He was at the relief of Lucknow ; and after
the Mutiny took part in many small campaigns in
India, and later in one of greater note in China, where
he was with the force that entered Peking in i860.
Already he had begun writing on military subjects,
and it was in 1869, when he was still only thirty-six
years of age, that be brought out the Soldier's Pocket
Book ( The Soldier's Pocket Book for Field Service was
its full-dress title), which was a text-book for many
years to follow.
That publication put the hall-mark on his reputa
tion. Very shortly he was in command of the Red
River expedition, as it was called, in Canada, to
suppress the revolt inaugurated by Louis Riel. After
a complete and quick success in this command he
came back to the post of Assistant Adjutant-General
at the War Office. The next little expedition that
he took in charge was the Ashanti War, with the
march to Coomassie and final capture of the capital.
All this was before the Eighties. Just at the
beginning of the decade he was in South Africa,
" winding up the clew," in Homeric phrase, of the
Zulu War, but returned in 1880 to take up the ap
pointment of Quartermaster-General, and two years
later that of Adjutant-General to the Forces.
He had scarcely entered on this new post before he
was summoned to Egypt to put his hand to check
the trouble which Arabi Pasha was creating (or with

A GREAT ORGANISER 105
which, at least, Arabi's name was most prominently
associated). As with every military venture to which
he committed himself, the result was a brilliant
and a brilliantly rapid success. I have mentioned
these few of the leading points in Lord Wolseley's
career in order to make clear how uninterrupted
was the series of his victories. They were achieved
in little campaigns ; we may perhaps say, they were
short campaigns. That is perfectly true, but at
the same time that we make this admission we may
well speculate how much larger and longer they might
have grown had it not been for the masterful dis
positions of Wolseley in planning out the details
beforehand, so that, once started, the mechanism all
moved smoothly through, without a stop or hitch, to
its appointed end. Wolseley did not live, unhappily,
to be a spectator even of the Great War, still less a
participator in it. Born in 1833, he lived the full
average span of human years without seeing Britain's
fight for life. In the relatively slight peril of the
Empire in the Boer War, his organisation as Com
mander-in-Chief was a chief means of giving her the
force, large beyond the expectation of almost all who
were best qualified to form a useful opinion on the
figure, which she needed to gain the victory. But
the qualities which Lord Wolseley possessed in un
common richness were just those of which our poor
country found herself in sore need in the later days
of her worst trial.
He was a scientific soldier, as I have said, at a time
when the numbers of scientific soldiers were very
few, when it was scarcely realised that such an
attribute as science of any kind could be required of
a soldier — especially of a soldier in a marching
regiment. Wolseley's brain was too active to let
him bow assent to that easy and lazy creed. He
must be at work on something. Even in his older

106 LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS
days I have seen him in the train, on the way down
to his home in Sussex, with desk and papers littering
half the carriage, and writing an article or a paper
or a memorandum as eagerly as if his life depended
on it all through the journey. Needless to say, in
the course of this career of which I have shortly
jotted down a few chief stages, he was culling honours,
medals, bars, letters of distinction after his name,
occasionally a more materially useful grant of money,
and so on. We knew him as Sir Garnet Wolseley at
the beginning of the Eighties. It was for the Tel-el-
Kebir victory over Arabi that he was made a peer.
Then, from baron he was raised to viscount for the
expedition that reached Khartoum too late.
He was a scientific soldier, and he was a fighting
soldier, too. He was more than a scientific soldier,
because he was a soldier of sympathy and imagination.
He realised the needs of his" men. He understood
their wants. He knew that they could not fight unless
they were fed, and even appreciated that besides their
bodily food they needed that their hearts should be
fed and filled with the confidence in their own power
to achieve success. He managed to instil this
influence into them by his own bearing and by his
personality — especially, perhaps, by his own success :
he was a " lucky " leader, a " mascot," at the same
time as his great experience, his keen capacity for
detail and his power of planning, organised for them
the fullest supply of such comforts as are at all possible
in a campaign. He knew both how to plan victory
when the battle was set in array and also how to put
in motion the mechanism required for bringing his
battalions in good order to the field. He was an
earnest student of the campaigns of great soldiers
of the past. He produced books on Napoleon and
Marlborough. His latest publication in book form
was, I think, the autobiographical Story of a Soldier's

LORD ROBERTS 107
Life. But his pen had very little rest after he had
put the sword finally into the scabbard. It was a
militant pen, too, that he could wield, and after leav
ing the War Office he wrote of some of its short
comings in terms that bit.
We have to estimate his value to his country not
only by the achievements, though they in themselves
are notable enough, that history has to put to his
credit, but further, by the worth of the rather new
idea of the British soldier which he imparted to the
military profession. He demonstrated by example,
as well as inculcated by precept, that it was a pro
fession to be studied, not merely a happy-go-lucky
affair to be " muddled through " somehow, with the
British bull-dog pluck as its only asset.
Lord Wolseley was the first of the Commanders-
in-Chief to be appointed on the five years' term of
office, after the death of the Duke of Cambridge.
His successor, in the middle of the Eighties, was a
soldier only second in eminence, even at that time,
to himself, and in later years second to none in all
the Empire— Lord Roberts. He was Sir Frederick
Roberts then. We knew a good deal about him in
England, but the only reason why we did not know
a great deal more and why we did not estimate him
very much more highly than we did, was that almost
all of his invaluable service had been done, thus far,
in India, and that it is the besetting imperial sin of
the ordinary Briton at home to pay criminally little
attention to what is being done for him in Greater
Britain. His autobiography, published in 1897, had
for its very appropriate title Forty-One Years in
India. It is possible that when Lord Roberts wrote
this volume he looked upon his active career as a
soldier almost in the light of history. He had done
enough for most men. Yet he was still to see the

108 LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS
country through its most critical moment in the
Boer War. He went to South Africa, and, taking
hold of the campaign with a comprehensive grasp
which none of the generals had shown before he went
there, carried it through a series of victories to a
triumphant close. What later he did must be in
the memory of all men : how he dinned into deaf
ears the necessity of conscription, under the better
title of National Service ; and how he died, as he had
lived, in camp, while visiting our lines in France during
the Great War.
It was both before and after, rather than during,
the period of the Eighties that Lord Roberts was
making his history — both his own and that of the
Empire. He had already endeared himself to the
Army under the title of " Little Bobs." With his
little stature, for he was indeed a tiny man, he had
done the deeds of heroes. In the Indian Mutiny
he had " gone for " a standard held by two Sepoys ;
had killed both standard bearers single-handed,
and brought back their colours. He was V.C., and
had all kinds of honour. But it was as the scourge
of Afghan treachery that Sir Frederick Roberts, as
he then was, was known in Great Britain at the
beginning of the Eighties. It was in 1879 that the
mission under Major Cavagnari had been massacred
in Cabul. Sir Frederick was then at Simla, whence
he hurried to Kurram and took command of that
expedition which avenged Cavagnari and his com
panions and captured the city of Cabul. Here he
was occupied in subduing the surrounding districts
to something like obedience until the following
summer, and was just about to withdraw his force
within the Indian boundaries when he had information
of the disaster of Maiwand, where a whole British
brigade was totally defeated, and of the siege of
General Primrose in Kandahar. Roberts was more

(From a photograph by Messrs. Russell & Sons.)
LORD ROBERTS.

108]

THE MARCH TO KANDAHAR 109
than three hundred miles distant, with a country of
desperate difficulty intervening ; Primrose and his
force were in urgent stress ; there was no other British
force within even this considerable range. Roberts'
march to Kandahar is one of the monuments in
military history. In that rugged district and amidst
hostile tribes he marched over three hundred miles —
313 is the official figure — in twenty-two days, fought
the battle of Kandahar the very day following,
and was triumphantly victorious. It is a record
which does marvellous credit both to the commander
and to his troops. Probably no commander, not
even Roberts, could have performed it with any other
troops in all the world ; probably even those troops
could not have achieved it under any other leader
than that little man in whom they believed as if he
were a god.
Already then, in the minds of all who knew any
thing of the story — and all England rang with the
names of Cavagnari and of Maiwand — he was of
" Kandahar." That title was linked to him by
glorious bonds. He was made Baronet and G.C.B.,
and advanced to the command of the army in Madras.
Always it seems to have been his role to repair
disaster. So we find it at Cabul, so at Kandahar;
and now, coming home on leave before taking up his
Madras command, he was claimed for a like purpose
in South Africa. There the Majuba Hill calamity
had just occurred. Sir Frederick Roberts must go
out to set it right. So he went, but on arrival found
terms of peace already agreed. He came back to
England and then returned to India. He became
Commander-in-Chief in succession to Sir Donald
Stewart in 1885. He came home in 1893 with the
title, bestowed the year before, of Lord Roberts of
Kandahar and Waterford ; and in 1895 was made
Field-Marshal.

1 10 LORD WOLSELEY AND LORD ROBERTS
It is said that there was one thing and one alone
of which Lord Roberts was afraid — a cat. I have
been told that he was one of those people of ultra-
feline sensitiveness who know when a cat is in the
room although it be invisible. It is always a pleasant
trait of weakness which makes a hero seem akin to
our common humanity. Besides courage of the
ordinary physical kind, Lord Roberts had his full
meed of that higher sort which fears neither responsi
bility nor reproach. His National Service campaign
was never popular, yet he never faltered in it ; and
the Great War came to prove all his contentions right.
And he must have had a great head, as well as a great
heart, belonging to that little body. He planned
every one of his campaigns, both the small and the
large, with a skill which made all their mechanism
go like clockwork ; and he seems to have been an
exact judge of the force required for each task that
he called on it to do, and also of the limits of what
it could do. And he had that infectious power,
magnetism, or call it what you will, which enabled
him to get from his men the very best that they had
to give — a born leader, a greatly loved man !

CHAPTER XI
TEMPLE, FARRAR, AND SOME OTHER CHURCHMEN
IT is an exceedingly valuable asset for the
Church to number among her hierarchs some
who are distinguished in other sciences than
those associated with theology or ecclesiology
— and especially valuable if those other sciences be
of the kind that are commonly named " exact."
Whether rightly or wrongly, it is apt to appear to
the ordinary man that these are the sciences which
require a peculiar hardness of brain and incision of
judgment. He has a particular respect for the
intellect which is thus equipped : it is the practical,
not the poetical ; it is not at all likely to be imposed
upon. Thus, the ordinary man, from his ordinary point
of view. And when he finds a scientist of this brain
equipment a devoted and convinced Christian, his
own weak, hesitating faith receives immense comfort
and reinforcement. If this man, he argues, with
his intellect so severe and searching and exact, can
accept these mysteries with such conviction, then
they must surely be very truth. Who, at least, am
I to doubt when such a mind is satisfied ?
Bishop, and later Archbishop, Temple was able to
render this particular kind of service to his Church
in quite uncommon measure. I wish it had been
my privilege to know him better than I did, but
though my personal acquaintance with him was very
slight, and no more than such as a middle-aged and

112 ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE
highly distinguished man might accord to a boy, I
used to hear a great deal about him in Devonshire
all through my school and undergraduate days.
He was then Bishop of Exeter ; and he was a bishop
of whom you would be sure to hear a great deal in
his diocese, and, maybe, beyond its borders. His
was a light which would not be hid under any sort of
diocesan bushel ; in the first place, because of the kind
of man that he was. He was always stirring, active,
a tremendous worker, and disposed to get a full day's
work out of others. Essentially a strong man in all
senses of the term — mental, moral, physical — you
could not tire him ; and he was something of a pug
nacious man too, very ready to fight for that which
his powerful judgment affirmed to be the right.
It was this militancy for the right which supplied
the second reason why he was a bishop whose light
would shine into all corners of the diocese, and farther.
I was of such age at the time of his appointment to
the bishopric as to be able to recall now some of the
echoes of the storm of discussion which it raised.
It was a Gladstonian appointment. He was a faithful
follower of Mr. Gladstone and a resolute advocate of
the disestablishment of the Irish Church. I am
writing of the year 1869, et circa, when Dr. Temple,
who had been for some ten years Headmaster of
Rugby School, was brought to Exeter, in his native
county. His own school had been the famous
Blundell's at Tiverton, the nursery of very many of
the Devon worthies. Thence he had gone to Balliol,
had taken his degree with a double first, had been
made a fellow, and a lecturer on mathematics and logic.
Thus was the hall-mark of hard-headedness, so valued
by the " man in the street," indelibly engraven by
his University. Then, either while at Rugby or before,
he had contributed an article entitled " The Education
of the World " to a volume which caused terrific con-

(From a photograph by Russell & Sons.)
ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, DR. TEMPLE-

112]

HIS COURAGE 113
troversy in high places, Essays and Reviews. If any
of a younger generation read those essays to-day he
may very well wonder what all the pother was about.
They will appear to him as most unlikely to inspire
controversial heat. But the controversial question
of to-day is often the accepted verdict of the morrow.
These essays discussed such problems as those which
Dr. Temple was to deal with later, as Bampton
Lecturer, under the title of The Relations between
Religion and Science, with a liberality of outlook
and a candour quite unusual in a Churchman of that
time. It was not so many years since the publication
of that book which really did create an epoch, The
Origin of Species. Christianity was still reeling a
little under the blow, which many deemed to be
mortal, delivered by Darwin. Her own particular
version of the genesis of the world was discredited
by the witness of the rocks and strata. The eyes of
the mathematical lecturer, stout Churchman though
he was, refused to accept the blinkers assumed by
many of his day to enable them to pass by without
seeing the array of irrefutable witness. He wrote freely
what he felt to be the truth, and he had his reward.
This frank utterance of his thought was typical.
Throughout his life he gave himself far less to the
gentle art of making friends than to the ungentle
art of telling truth. Notoriously this truth-telling is
not a practice tending to easy popularity. It tends
to something that is a great deal better. Besides
the intrinsic value of that true word which the man
may have to tell, his candour and courage in its
telling ensure him eventual appreciation by the more
discriminating minds, and a respect which is not often
accorded to those who gain facile friendships. He
was recognised as genuine, a very dependable man,
a little rugged of surface, maybe, but of pure diamond
at the core.
8

114 ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE
Such a man as this it was whom Mr. Gladstone
advanced to the See of Exeter. This, be it remem
bered, was at the very end of the Sixties. By a
score of years earlier even than the Eighties, the
man who dared to publish anything like advanced
views on such a problem as the relations of religion
and science was anywhere regarded with suspicion of
heterodoxy, if not worse. But the reason why Dr.
Temple was thus looked upon askance by some on
his first coming to his Devon see was not thus chrono
logical, solely. It was geographical, as well ; for we
of Devon, I fear, lived rather too far towards the
sunset to catch any of the earlier beams of the dawn
of progress. There was considerable outcry, protest,
dismay at the appointment ; but Dr. Temple was
quite fearless. He had no idea of apologising for
any of his acts or views. He was perfectly just, no
respecter of persons ; and a man of this character was
absolutely certain to make himself appreciated and
understood in the long run among the Devonians,
for these are just the qualities which they admire.
His clergy soon came to know that they could rely
on him absolutely. So at Exeter he remained for
more than fifteen years, and was sincerely regretted
when he went, in the middle of the Eighties, to be
Bishop of London.
By that time men knew him for what he was,
a strong, just, broad-minded man, of great zeal for
what he deemed the right and an amazing power of
work. Thirteen and fourteen hours were spoken of
as his normal working day.
Towards the end he had to suffer the penalty of
this tremendous energy : his eyes failed. When
he was raised in 1897 to the highest dignity in the
Church, the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the pro
digious working power was spent. His death came
five years later.

FARRAR'S LITERARY WORK 115
Archdeacon Farrar, later Dean of
Canterbury
Perhaps the value of a preacher's sermons is not very
precisely measured by the numbers of the congrega
tion that he attracts, but it is at all events a popular
and a convenient standard ; and, thus estimated, few
stood higher than Archdeacon Farrar. He became
Archdeacon of Westminster in 1883, and had been
Rector of St. Margaret's since 1876. His previous
career had been one of much distinction. He had
taken a first in " Greats," and I rather think that he
won the " Newdigate." He became a schoolmaster
and set himself to write books, in the form of novels,
on school-boy life. In the intervals, by way of re
laxation, he would now and then throw off a work
dealing with Greek Syntax or the like.
It is a difficult art, that of writing of school life.
There is but one who has made a real success in that
art, and he was a man of but one book — to count.
That was Thomas Hughes, of course, with his Tom
Brown at Rugby. Farrar had been at some school
in the Isle of Man and the school scenes in his Eric,
or Little by Little, which was the first and best of his
school-boy books, were based on that experience.
He handicapped himself by the didactic moral purpose
which is always obvious. They are not real, in
comparison with the vividness of Tom Brown. But
they achieved a certain popularity.
But the book by which he was best known, as it
was also his best book, was the Life of Christ. He
had all the possible qualities for so great and grave
a task : knowledge, devotion, earnest piety, graceful
phrase, and rather exceptionally first-hand acquaint
ance with that Palestine in which Christ's life was
passed, and which probably has not very largely
changed in the nearly two thousand years which

n6 ARCHDEACON FARRAR
have since lapsed. Farrar's Life of Christ is one
of the relatively few books which are not likely to die.
Then, just after he had given up the Headmastership
of Marlborough to come to St. Margaret's, he published
a book of which the boldness took most people by
surprise. Hitherto I do not think that they had
associated him with strength ; or would it be more
right to say that they deemed his strength to be
rather in his gentleness ? Exactly how his ecclesais-
tical attitude should be defined I do not know.
Assuredly he was not a High Churchman. His
leaning was rather in the other direction and to the
avoidance of ritual ceremony. Yet to speak of him
as Evangelical would be to suggest an idea of narrow
ness which certainly was not part of his outlook.
His position is indicated, in some measure, by the fact
of his inaugurating the Anglican, Brotherhood.
The book which surprised us then would, of course,
surprise no one now, even from the pen of a divine
of far less breadth of view than Farrar. Its title was
Eternal Hope, and much of its purpose was to contest
the doctrine, then held orthodox, of the sinner's eternal
hopelessness, of his unending torture in the fire that is
never quenched. It is singular, and a fact which
throws curiously illuminating lights on that very
curious product of evolution which we call the human
mind, that gentle Christian men and women found it
extremely hard to persuade themselves to part with
a doctrine which implied a delight in cruelty enjoyed
by their Christian God infinitely far surpassing the
worst that the most savage imagination has ever
attributed to the niost hideous and bloodthirsty
devil of its invention. They clung to their fiery and
eternal hell. It appeared to many as if Farrar had
committed an act of sacrilege, of blasphemy, in arguing
for the rejection of this awful abomination. Had he
done no other act of value in the course of his long and

CANONS LIDDON AND AINGER 117
energetic life of usefulness, he would have justified
himself more than enough by this single book alone,
by its quenching of these eternal and infernal flames,
and by the better hope — the " Eternal Hope," as
its joyful title said — which it held before the eyes
of men whose own imagination had conjured to them
a future of eternal desperation. In that book alone
was cause sufficient why London went in its legions
to hear Farrar at St. Margaret's.
He was an easy and fluent preacher, a little florid,
fond of the picturesque phrase. In any sermon by
Farrar you were disappointed if you did not at least
once have mention of " the mother-of-pearl-coloured
ocean." Some of the more fastidious professed to
find the ocean, thus beautiful of surface hue, a little
lacking in depth. But of his popularity there could
be no question. It was, moreover, a personal equally
as a professional popularity. He had a great social
charm, a fine presence, a gentle, welcoming smile.
On this social side he was ably abetted by Mrs.
Farrar and their family. His, I think, was always a
happy, peaceful outlook, inspired by the Eternal
Hope, and unvexed by those temporal worries which
beset, and upset, so many ; not at all because they
are intrinsically formidable, but merely because the
vexed spirit is too sensitive to their troubling.
Farrar was in London throughout the Eighties,
and went as Dean to Canterbury in 1895, where he
died in harness.
There were many other divines of eminence in
these years whose portraits should be given if space
permitted. Liddon, delighting great congregations
at St. Paul's with his perfect diction, his rich eloquence,
and his refined and beautiful face, has been very
ably sketched by Mr. Russell. Ainger was at the
Temple, as yet but Reader, soon to be exalted to

118 SOME OTHER CHURCHMEN
the dignity of Master. " The Most Valiant the Master
of the Temple "is, I believe, the full ceremonial title
of that mastership, and it provokes a smile when
associated with the aspect of Ainger, whom all that
knew him loved, but in whom none could see a terrific
or very militant figure. He was small, thin, wizened,
with a narrow face and the whitest possible hair.
Give George Grossmith a snowy head and you would
have had a very good imitation of Ainger. He was
a notable preacher, but his gifts were really literary
rather than rhetorical. He was a great lover of
Charles Lamb, whose Life he wrote, and I always used
to think of his as a very kindred spirit to Lamb's, in
its rare unity of gentleness and brightness. I could
sympathise with him less in his admiration of Crabbe,
whose Life also he wrote. He was, I believe, a very
excellent amateur actor, though I never saw him on
the boards ; but I have heard him recite toadmiration.
His reading of The Ancient Mariner made your flesh
creep and haunted you for days. And when he re
cited the verses of his favourite Crabbe he did seem
to get some life and spirit in them, which I never am
able to awaken by my own reading. Doubtless
Ainger was right, and mine the faulty taste.
Another who had not yet come to his own was
Scott Holland, known at that time chiefly at Oxford,
where he was a " Senior Student," as it is called, at
Christ Church. London had not in those years its
opportunity to realise that splendid eloquence which
took it captive a little later.
In 1883 the Archbishopric of Canterbury passed
at Dr. Tait's death to Dr. Benson, highly distinguished
father of distinguished sons. It is a singular coinci
dence that at school with him, at King Edward VI's
School at Birmingham, were both Lightfoot and
Westcott. All three went on to Trinity, Cam
bridge, and Westcott succeeded Lightfoot, on the

(From a photograph by Elliott & Fry.)
ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, DR. BENSON.

118]

BENSON, LIGHTFOOT, AND WESTCOTT 119
latter's death, in 1889, in the Bishopric of Durham.
Later, Westcott was at Cambridge as Professor of
Divinity, where Lightfoot was Hulsean Lecturer.
About the time that Benson was consecrated Arch
bishop, Westcott became a Canon of Westminster,
and Benson almost immediately made him his exam
ining chaplain. So singularly intertwined were the
lives of the three school-fellows. Westcott 's name
is perhaps particularly remembered in connection
with the Revised Version of the New Testament, to
which he gave his devoted attention while he was at
Cambridge. I imagine, though I speak with no
authority whatever for expressing an opinion, that
Lightfoot was really the most deeply learned of the
three. Westcott was a man of wider interests : his
outlook embraced art, music, literature. If the
Archbishop were to be described in a phrase, one
would say, I imagine, that he was a great ecclesiastical
statesman. The better government of the Church
within its own walls, and the better relations of Church
and State, occupied his mind and were the objects
of his constant endeavour. He was active on Par
liamentary Commissions dealing with Church matters
and in the promotion of Bills affecting the Church —
in a word, he fulfilled to admirable perfection the
functions of this highest spiritual office.
The strong figure of Creighton had scarcely come
on the stage in any important role during the Eighties.
He was at Cambridge at that time, already hard at
his great work, The History of the Papacy. He soon
became recognised as one of the leading men in the
Church, with a profound knowledge of ecclesiastical
history. It was not until the appointment of Temple,
in 1897, t0 tne Archbishopric that he was much in
London. In succession to Temple he was made
Bishop of London, and from that time till his death,
in 1 90 1, he was always in the forefront in his diocese

120 SOME OTHER CHURCHMEN
Dean Church, as he was always designated, was at
St. Paul's during all this decade, as he had been
almost all through the Seventies. He was appointed
to the deanery in 1871, and held it till his death at
the end of 1890. It was a long-held office, which
gave him a considerable leisure for literary work.
He wrote on Bacon and on Spenser, as well as on
many ecclesiastical questions, in a rather pure, dry,
and unimpressioned style. It would not be as untrue
as it often is to say that in this case the style was
the man — the natural expression of his own nature.
A pathetic interest attaches to his last appearance
at any public function. This was the funeral of
Liddon. His own health was very indifferent at the
time, and he died in the same year.

CHAPTER XII
HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
THAT is a tremendously impressive face that
looks down on you, in marble, on your
right-hand side, as you enter the Natural
History Museum, in the Cromwell Road.
On the pedestal of the figure you will read Thomas
Henry Huxley. Born May 4th, 1825. Died June
29th, 1895. It is an exceedingly well-graven image,
showing much of the very nature of the great man and
profound thinker who was its original, though the
sculptor never had the advantage of seeing that
original in life. Those who knew the living face best,
and loved it most, find the lines which the photograph
has shown the sculptor to be rather over-emphasised,
so that the kindlier look which the face wore in life
is lost. The statue, moreover, has the disadvantage
that it is not placed in the position for which it was
intended, so that the light does not fall on it as its
creatorl had proposed. But the living face itself
was tremendous, just because of those forceful and
deep lines of thought and feeling which lend them
selves to expression by the maker of images. There
are faces which are as masks, hiding the character
of the man behind them. This face is of quite another
kind. It seems as if it must tell the true story of the
man. And it does.
What is very singular about this quite remarkable
face of Huxley's is, that its characteristic lines were
graven, plainly legible on it, at an age when most faces
121

122 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
still keep much of the smoothness of youth. It was
not so with him. In the Eighties he was between
sixty and seventy years old ; he had long ago made
his name, had thought those thoughts which had
so impressed themselves on his features, had done
much of the writing which we still read with delight
in the clear, trenchant style, though the science may
to-day be as rungs of a ladder which others, climbing
by their aid, have left below them. But they are
rungs which those others have been able to leave, just
because Huxley himself took a master-hand in fixing
them in place ; and when he so fixed them they were
the rungs at the very top. It must ever be so unless
science itself ceases to mount higher.
Huxley, of course, builded largely on Darwin, as
who did not that builded at all solidly at that time ?
No doubt some of the earlier Darwinians deceived
themselves more than a little, in the enthusiasm
kindled by that new light which evolution shed,
believing that the edifice based thereon was more
immovable, more complete, and more heaven-scaling
than further examination has proved it. Huxley,
to whom scepticism appealed as a quite positive
intellectual and moral virtue, was cautious. " Scep
ticism," he writes, in Method and Results, " is the
highest of duties ; blind faith the one unpardonable
sin." Yet for all his scepticism — he used to say of
himself that he was rightly named Thomas, after the
doubting apostle — he did not escape some share in
the deception. At the same time he maintained his
characteristic attitude so far that he always made
one important reservation in his acceptance of the
Darwinian view of the way in which new species are
produced. And besides this reservation to his faith
in the solution of biological puzzles by natural
selection, he saw quite clearly that there always
must remain one puzzle which evolution is perfectly

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY.

A MELANCHOLY RECORD 123
inadequate to solve — itself. Given evolution, he
might have believed that all terrestrial progress
could be explained — I hope and believe that I state
his position rightly in thus writing of it — but whence
the gift was derived, from what hand it came, he
deemed beyond all human knowledge. Hence, and
so far, he was agnostic — a term still rather novel in
the Eighties, and of Huxley's own adoption. It was
a view of life, as I have tried to sketch it, which
seemed as though it must bring with it most profound
and tragic sadness. Could it well be otherwise ?
Listen to what he found when he cast up the account
of evolution. This is how he reckoned the net
result : " I know of no study which is so unutterably
sad as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set
forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness
of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of
his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only
more intelligent than other brutes ; a blind prey to
impulses which as often as not lead him to destruction ;
a victim to endless illusions which make his mental
existence a terror and a burthen, and fill his physical
life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain
degree of comfort, and develops a more or less work
able theory of life in such favourable situations as the
plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then for
thousands and thousands of years struggles with
varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness,
bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at this
point against the greed and the ambition of his
fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and other
wise persecuting all those who first try to get him to
move on ; and when he has moved a step farther
foolishly confers post-mortem deification On his
victims. He exactly repeats the process with all
who want to move a step yet farther." (Nineteenth
Century, February 1889.)

124 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
We hardly may expect a man with this desperate
record of human misery at his heart to wear a smiling
face to the world. He wore what had the aspect of
a profoundly sad face ; though the aspect of an
unflinchingly brave face, nevertheless. But those
who knew him best, those of his own household who
have the best and almost the only right to speak with
authority on such a point, have affirmed him " the
least sad man in the world." Could this be possible
had he not some brighter hope for the world's future
than this which his appeal to the historical record
seems to forecast ? That he had this better hope,
however, is testified by many of those pithy Aphorisms
and Reflections, collected by Mrs. Huxley and pub
lished under that title in Macmillan's Golden Treasury
Series. We have the key to it suggested in No.
CXIX, for instance : " My belief is that no human
being, and no society composed of human beings, ever
did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct
was governed and guided by the love of some ethical
ideal." Much more fully and succinctly the faith
here indicated is set out in No. CCLII :
" The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe
has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the sum
mit will be reached and the downward route will be
commenced. The most daring imagination will
hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and
the intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession
of the great year.
" Moreover, the cosmic nature born with us and,
to a large extent, necessary for our maintenance,
is the outcome of millions of years of severe training,
and it would be folly to imagine that a few centuries
will suffice to subdue its masterfulness to purely
ethical ends. Ethical nature may count upon having
to reckon with a tenacious and powerful enemy as

BUT A " LARGER HOPE " 125
long as the world lasts. But, on the other hand, I see
no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will,
guided by sound principles of investigation, and
organised in common effort, may modify the condi
tions of existence, for a period longer than that now
covered by history. And much may be done to
change the nature of man himself. The intelligence
which has converted the brother of the wolf into
the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able
to do something towards curbing the instincts of
savagery in civilised men.
" But if we may permit ourselves a larger hope of
abatement of the essential evil of the world than
was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact
knowledge, faced the problem of existence more
than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential
condition of the realisation of that hope that we should
cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and
sorrow is the proper object of life."
It was possible for him, therefore, with this ethical
aim in view, to possess his soul not cheerfully but with
a brave patience, in a tempered optimism. As he
writes elsewhere, " The conclusion of the whole matter
seems to be that if Ormuzd has not had his way in
this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as
little consonant with the fact of sentient existence as
optimism." At that rather poor best he felt compelled to leave
the riddle. The two gods of Huxley's conscious
worship were knowledge and truth. He would have
said, in fact, that they were but one, since, for him,
although he had a keen appreciation of artistic beauty,
all truth must have a large element of the intellectual.
At the very moment when death cut his still keen
energies short he was engaged in a critique of Arthur
Blfifour's Foundations of Belief, which had attributed
to the agnostics certain views which Huxley did not

126 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
admit to be an accurate account of their position.
I mention this controversy just at this point, because
the question in what degree truth is purely intellectual
is so closely involved in the question of the foundations
of our beliefs. Huxley's criticism was intended to
be made in two halves, in shape of two articles in the
Nineteenth Century. One was published, but the other
not — because death had in the meantime arrested
the trenchant pen of the writer. I have always
thought the loss of that second article a very great
loss, because it was the second article in which, as
was sufficiently evident from the first, the writer
intended to concentrate the pith of his argument,
In the first he wrote with the velvet glove, in appre
ciation of all the brilliant merit of this contribution
to philosophy by one who was by profession a states
man, but under that soft glove one might feel, even
in these very phrases of laudation, that the hand
beneath was iron, and that iron, cold iron> would be
brought down with its full weight and sternness in
the concluding section. But the iron never fell.
One need not be a scientific person in order to
appreciate the extraordinary clarity and the penetrat
ing edge of Huxley's thought. It is not a common
characteristic of men of science to take wide views.
Usually their range is restricted. But Huxley's
range was exceptionally wide, and his essays on social
subjects are vital still. We may read to-day that
essay on " The Struggle for Existence in Human
Society," in the volume called Evolution and Ethics,
and find that it is not only of living interest, but has
argument so in advance of the date (1891) of its
writing, that it has not yet been overtaken by
humanity's progressive thought. It still points ahead.
Huxley devotedly worshipped truth, as he saw it,
and worshipped it quite regardless of the cost. Even
if it led him right up to such a painful recital of the

THREE VOYAGERS 127
world's story as I have quoted from his pen, he would
not recoil from it, turn aside, nor strive to blur its
poignant outlines under any veil.
Few people perhaps remember that in early life
he had been in the Navy, as a surgeon. It is remark
able that a like early destiny was in some part the
means of making the names of Darwin and also that
of Hooker, the great botanist, and Huxley's life-long
friend. What the Voyage of the Beagle was to
Darwin, the voyage of the Rattlesnake was to
Huxley. The Rattlesnake went out, on survey
work, to Torres Strait, and in the southern and
tropical seas Huxley found a wealth of animal life
for his study. It was wealth which had not been
very seriously raided before. He brought home new
facts, new specimens, new deductions ; and the
deductions were of such value that he came to his
own, straightway, and obtained his due recognition
from the biologists of the Royal Society. Darwin,
Hooker, and Huxley all owed much of their oppor
tunities to the spacious leisure which ship life in the
old sailing days gave to all, and especially to those who
were not actively concerned with the navigation.
They had " all the time there was " in which to
think, and the teeming life of the warm seas gave them
plenty about which to occupy their thoughts. The
mental apparatus which each of the three brought to
bear on these problems was far above the normal
standard. The outcome could scarcely fail to be
remarkable. Like the others, however, Huxley did
not long " follow the sea," and certainly there was
little in his later appearance of the bluff sailorman ;
save that he kept his face close-shaven except for
some side-whiskers, there was nothing. His aspect
revealed the man of thought, the student, in the
tall, spare, but wide-shouldered figure, the splendid,
forceful yet tragic features, the heavy shock of iron-

128 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
grey hair worn rather long. No one who did not know
him was likely to pass him without asking of another
who might be better informed, " Who's that ? "
His was a face that arrested the eyes in a crowd.
There was a third god whom Huxley worshipped
with a less conscious cult than he paid to truth and
knowledge — kindliness. Just where he found room
for that saving grace in his despairing summary of
our fate I do not well know, but he was himself an
object lesson that the world has a better hope than he
perceived in it. To his own family circle, to his
friends and to humanity in its widest distribution,
a kind man, and a welcome and much sought guest
in all circles where his trenchant talk was appreciated.
To some who knew him little he might appear a stern
man, but, beneath the rind, he was not only warm of
heart, but even soft — soft, that is, to everything that
did not offend the great god Truth. That offence
was always, for him, the deadly sin. All the seven
deadlies of the Christian were summed up for him in
that. I write, at least, of the opinion which I, on
a very slight acquaintance which I much wish had
been closer, formed of him. And I do not think that
his Life, as admirably presented to us by his son,
gainsays that view. There was not kindliness only,
but humour withal, in the glint of the keen eyes that
were set in so deep under the shaggy eyebrows. It
was more often by the appreciative look than by the
spoken word that he showed his response to humorous
suggestion. His was the quiet, " pawky " humour
of the Scot rather than the more expansive and less
subtle English mirth, though I do not know that he
had a single vein of Scottish blood. It is true that he
was for two University sessions in Edinburgh, but
scarcely long enough to have assimilated its atmo
sphere. What he did most fully appreciate was the
tonic truculence of its climate. He often referred

DARWIN, HUXLEY, AND OWEN 129
to it with a most profound respect ; and as for North
Berwick and its breezes, straight off the eastern sea,
he used to speak of it with an almost awful admira
tion as " a place to which people go, from Edinburgh,
to be braced ! "
Just what the value to science of Huxley's life and
work was, I suppose one would need to be a scientist,
and a scientist in his own line, which was biology, to
know ; but if science had not claimed so much of his
thought he might have been a most effective states
man, public servant, or man of business. So at least
I have been told by some of those who sat on Royal
Commissions with him. There is no doubt that he
did much very useful public work on these Com
missions, in spite of his engrossment in his profession
as a biologist. Indeed it was for this service perhaps,
even more than for his contributions to science, that
he was made a Privy Councillor. It is as biologist,
as thinker, and as writer however, that his name will
be remembered, and will go down to historical fame.
As we enter that fine central hall of the Natural
History Museum, we meet the large figure in marble
of Darwin, seated, facing us, and looking down upon
us from the first landing of the stairs. On the right
hand Huxley, also seated, and beside us, as we stand
regarding, Owen. These three, like three great gods
of Science, share the Pantheon between them. For
the rest it is filled with the stuffed animals and the
show-cases, from the huge elephant to the pigmy
shrew among the mammals, various insect demons
magnified to a terrific size, illustrations of colour
protection, all and sundry " exhibits." They form a
singular trio. Darwin and Huxley may be said to
stand solidly together for the new theories of evolu
tion. Owen, on the other hand, although he lived
right through the Eighties, dying only in 1892, still
held, as fast as it was at all possible that a man of
9

130 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
science could hold such a faith, by the older scientific
theories, though not perhaps to the exact letter of the
Book of Genesis. If orthodoxy compelled belief
in the literal reading of the Biblical account of the
genesis of life in the world, it is plain that orthodoxy
and evolution were incompatible. Hence arose bitter
controversy, not always kept quite within the pale of
courtesy and due reverence to a belief which, however
the new scientists might be convinced of its proved
falsity, was still sacred to very many. Bishop
Wilberforce's attack, and Huxley's counter-attack —
to write of it merely as a defence were to take all
the edge off the weapons which he wielded with a
terrible deftness — give good examples of the debate.
But, in truth, all the weapons were with Huxley, in
addition to a full measure of ability to turn them to
account. Those who maintained the literal version
of the Book of Genesis, declining to see in it a specimen
of folk-lore common in its main features to very many
races of mankind in very different parts of the globe,
whenever man reached the stage of meditating on the
creation of the life by which he saw himself to be
surrounded and to be a part, had in the long run to
confess defeat. The verdict of the rocks and strata
of the earth, first called into court by the great
geologist Charles Lyell, was even more decisively
fatal to their case than the researches of Darwin or of
Wallace. Gradually the Christian Church began to
learn that it could concede all the most essential
points claimed by the evolutionists, while still re
taining the most essential points of its own ancient
faith. Professor Drummond indeed was soon to
claim evolution itself as religion's ally, with his
Natural Law in the Spiritual World. But for the
moment faith in all Bible teaching had received a
staggering blow ; and in their consequent discomfiture
its adherents said many hard and bitter things of the

DARWIN'S BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER 131
great intellects and noble men who had brought it
all upon them. No one can possibly read the life of
Charles Darwin, as it is finely told by his son, and fail
to realise that this was a man as great and good of
heart as of brain, devoted to the service of his fellows
and serving them with an unswerving eye to truth.
A more perfect Christian in his character and in his
dealings with his fellow men it were impossible either
to name or to imagine. The wonderful modesty of
the man and the tentative humility with which he ad
vanced his great discoveries and theories were beyond
all praise and most worthy of all men's imitation.
But yet, most naturally, stinging things were said
of him, of him and of Huxley also, by those with
whose cherished views the new science came into
opposition. It aroused in its turn some bitterness of spirit in
its opponents, but less perhaps in the great men them
selves than in some of their disciples, possibly for the
very reason that they were not quite so great and
could not so generously forgive. Professor Owen,
although at the outset fiercely opposing Darwin's
theory of the Origin of Species, nevertheless seems to
have regarded himself as in some sort anticipating
Darwin himself in its discovery, so that his attitude
is difficult to understand, and some of his writings are
difficult to reconcile with each other. It was this,
most likely, which gave such bitterness to their con
troversy. Moreover, Owen's concern with the affair
was really very direct, and on this account also
Darwin may have resented it the more. He was
primarily an osteologist, a student of bones, whence
it was said of him, with not more than tolerable
accuracy perhaps, that from a fossil thigh he could
reconstruct the complete prehistoric animal.
Punch, so far back as 1861, had a poem signed
Gorilla," with a picture of the great ape and the

1 32 HUXLEY AND THE EVOLUTIONISTS
question under : " Am I a Man and a Brother ? "
of which one verse went —
" Next Huxley replies
That Owen, he lies,
And garbles his Latin quotation ;
That his facts are not new.
His mistakes not a few.
Detrimental to his reputation."
The controversy waxed fierce, far beyond the
bounds of merely scientific circles. There is frequent
reference to it in the general writings of the day.
As Leonard Huxley reminds us, in the Life and Letters
of his father, " echoes of the great Hippocampus
question linger in the delightful pages of The Water-
Babies." It is all a debate which has no living place in the
thought of the twentieth century. Here and there
you may still chance on some dear old lady who will
say with a pained look, when you speak of " the great
Darwin," or " the great Huxley," as the case may be :
" Ah, what I should call ' the wicked Darwin,' or
' the wicked Huxley.' " It is all really dead matter
of ancient history, for it was in the Sixties that the
storm arose. But it still raged furiously and vitally
in the Eighties.

CHAPTER XIII
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK (LATER, LORD AVEBURY)
WHEN you mention the name of any man or
woman of note you commonly feel that
you know with tolerable accuracy the
idea that the name is likely to conjure in
the mind of the person you are talking to. Of Lloyd
George, let us say, or Foch, or Beatty, you know fairly
well what their immediate thought will be, and what
attributes will be associated with the names before
their mental eye, as soon as one or other is mentioned.
That was just as true in the Eighties of the eminent
men of that day as it is now. But there was one man,
exceptionally, at that time of whom you could not
be in the least degree confident what kind of idea you
would summon in the mind of a friend when you
spoke his name. That man was Sir John Lubbock,
who was afterwards created Lord Avebury.
If your friend was a Parliament man it is likely
that Proportional Representation is the matter which
Lubbock's name would immediately bring to his
thoughts, for Lord Avebury never failed in his zeal
in advocating this measure, conjointly with his friend
Mr. Leonard Courtney, afterwards Lord Courtney of
Penwith. If it were a City man that you were talking
to, the name would at once suggest banking. Sir
John's firm was Robarts, Lubbock & Co., and he was
a leader in all financial movements in the City. If you
spoke of him to a countryman, with an ordinary
intelligent interest in the animal life that he saw about
him in the fields and woodlands, he would at once say,
133

134 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
" Oh, yes — Sir John Lubbock — that's the ant man."
If you mentioned him within the learned precincts
of the Athenaeum Club, there were still two lines of
thought that you might evoke ; if you were speaking to
an antiquarian, the name of Lubbock would have
associations for him with the history of early civilisa
tions ; if a biologist, he would at once recall some
valuable original research work done by Lubbock in
the very early years of his career. And now, if you
went out into Pall Mall or Regent Street and said
" Lubbock " to " the man in the street," the answer
you would unfailingly get would be, " Sir John
Lubbock 1 Why, yes ; that's the fellow what gave
us the Bank 'Oliday."
The extraordinary thing is that there . was no
illusion nor mistake about any one of these varied
images that the one name might conjure up. All
were real presentments of a man of an extraordinary
number of interests and activities. It was a mar
vellous versatility, and of course it gave opportunity to
persons who were perhaps a little jealous for cheap
jibes. A much quoted jibe was that " the men of
science thought he was a great banker, and the
bankers thought he was a great man of science."
If any one will take the trouble to look at his Life and
Letters, which it was my own privilege to be allowed
to write and to edit, they will very quickly see that
this estimate is as unjust as it is illiberal. It was
really the scientists who credited him with very real
and original contributions to science ; and this, at
an uncommonly early age. They expressed heartfelt
disappointment when he forsook, or partially forsook,
the paths of science to wander in the wilderness of
political life. A little banking they could permit
him : it was at a very early age that he went from
Eton into the firm, and he found time for much
scientific work in the intervals of office hours.

SIR JOHN LUBBOCK (LORD AVEBURY).

134]

AN ECONOMIST OF TIME 135
It was marvellous how he found the time. All
through life his economy of time was something
approaching a miracle. He was full of small time
economies. I remember staying with him once and
hearing in the morning next to my dressing-room his
voice as it were in recitation. I had an idea he might
be saying his prayers aloud. The fact, as I after
wards learnt, was that he was opening his morning's
letters, one by one, as he dressed, and dictating the
answers to each, as soon as read, into a dictaphone.
Thence the replies would be read off later, usually
by the girls' governess acting as secretary, typed, and
brought to him to sign. Thus, by the hour that he
came down to breakfast, the bulk of his correspon
dence, which was vast, would have been dealt with
and very few minutes wasted in it. He got through
more work in the day than any other man I ever knew,
yet he never seemed to be at all strained or over
worked : the secret of which I presume to be that
though he never left a minute idle he never hurried.
A very great deal of what Lord Avebury did, and
also of what he was, is to be attributed beyond all
doubt to the happy chance that as a boy he had the
great Darwin as his near neighbour. Darwin lived
at Downe, close to the family home of John Lubbock's
father and his numerous brothers at Orpington.
Evidently the great man became attracted by the
boy. He advised him as to courses of study ; he
infected him with his own zeal ; he taught him how
to observe, what questions to put to Nature ; he
taught him, too, the wise use of time, and both by
example and by precept inspired in him the conviction
of the value to a man's usefulness and happiness of
patience and control over self. It is impossible to
read Charles Darwin's Life, written with equal ability
and affection by his son, now Sir Francis, and doubt that
he was one of the very best of men, one of the noblest

136 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
characters, as well as the man who has perhaps done
more service to mankind than any other by his
studies. Of like nobility, patience, and self-control
became John Lubbock, very largely, as he himself
was the first to say, through Darwin's influence.
Even in his own home he was not without the incentive
of example in scientific study, for his father was a
great astronomer and mathematician. Both by
heritage and environment he was well placed.
At the beginning of the Eighties Sir John, who had
sat in the Commons for ten years for Maidstone, in
his native county, was unseated, but he was im
mediately elected for a constituency which probably
pleased him better — London University. It is a
testimony to his quick grasp of Parliamentary pro
cedure that though he first came into the House early
in 1870 it was in 1871 that he succeeded in passing
that Bank Holiday Act which made his name
immediately known all over England. The first
Monday in August was sometimes called the Feast
of St. Lubbock by grateful holiday makers. He
was successful in passing many other Bills while he
was a member of the Lower House ; indeed the only
measure, as I think, in which he was closely interested,
which has not yet been put on record in the Statute
Book is that Proportional Representation to which
I have already referred. But, as we all know, that
is far from a dead project even to-day, and maybe
it will yet survive to be an accomplished fact to
justify his work for it.
As almost always, there are two points of view from
which this nearly unbroken success may be regarded,
and it has been open to some who looked on it with
a rather grudging eye to suggest that it was achieved
mainly because the measures for which he fought
were those only which he thought he might carry.
Maybe. We may accept that criticism and yet ask

HIS MODESTY 137
whether in thus limiting himself Sir John Lubbock
did not show the highest wisdom. Assuredly he had
sufficient occupation for his time : none are likely to
deny that ; and surely it was a sign of a good judg
ment to devote himself to those projects which he saw
a good chance of bringing to a useful issue, rather
than spend himself in vain efforts for causes which
he could not hope to win. As a matter of fact,
however, that first and most popular measure, the
Bank Holiday Bill, looked so unlikely to pass that
one so well versed in all the ways and wiles of Parlia
ment as Disraeli himself, told Sir John that it was no
good his bringing it in : it could not succeed. But
bring it in he did, nevertheless, and pass it did.
He was a man of exceedingly quiet, one would say
of exceedingly modest, manner. He was perfectly
charming in the way that he would ask the opinion,
with an apparent deference, of persons, even of chil
dren, who could hardly conceivably have an opinion
worth listening to, on the subject of discussion, in
comparison with his own. Yet he did not think so ;
he was always anxious to hear a new view, never
knowing what new light it might throw. He had a
mind singularly open; and yet, though open, it
was very carefully selective. He would take a word
of wisdom out of the mouth of a babe, but he would
not take a word that was not wise, even though
it fell from the mouth of one famed as a very fount
of wisdom. It is not at all surprising, nor contrary
to character, that he should neglect the advice of
Disraeli on a Parliamentary point, even on his first
crossing the Westminster threshold. Under that very
quiet manner he had a will of strong determination,
and, besides, a perseverance that one might almost
imagine he had acquired in imitation of those ants
that he was so fond of studying. One who had
worked with him in some political scheme told me that

138 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
his industry in writing notes with a view to getting
support for his scheme was amazing : he neglected
no possible chance ; and what was ant-like about him
is that when he was foiled and worsted in one channel
of attack he never wasted any time in repining, but
immediately set to work to renew the attack by some
other channel. Thus he was very difficult to defeat.
A great City magnate, who was a friend of his,
gave me an account of a meeting of Foreign Bond
holders at which Sir John had to preside. It had to
deal with affairs of South American Republics, and
there was a strong revolutionary element, rather in
keeping with the usual lurid temperature of those
picturesque regions, resolved to assert itself at the
meeting. His friend had rather feared for him, thai;
he might not be able to rule the storm, " but," as he
told me afterwards, " it was wonderful how that man,
with his quiet voice, by just coming back and back
to his point again after each outburst was over,
and never losing his temper or his head, at length
brought the whole meeting round to his own way of
thinking and gained his end."
There was one quality at least for which even his
detractors were bound to give him credit — his
character, his absolute honesty of purpose ; and in
every British gathering, at all events, that is an asset
that counts for a great deal. I do not believe that
he had enemies : he was so kind that it was hardly
conceivable he could arouse enmity ; but he had
detractors : men who were a little envious, because
they could not imagine how it was that he, with such
apparent ease, achieved successes denied to their more
strenuous effort. And his ability was so little of the
self-assertive kind that people were apt to underrate
it. He wrote some of the most popular books in
the world. I believe that with the single exception
of Jessica's First Prayer, a small book for children

HIS VERSATILITY 139
of which probably few of the present generation have
so much as heard, his Pleasures of Life has been
translated into more languages than any other work
ever written in English. His manner of reading was
typical of his time-saving methods. He had a number
of slips of paper, large enough for the taking of notes,
always ready to hand, and as he read he used one of
these slips as marker, to keep the place, and jotted
down on it reflections and references to quotations,
which quotations his secretary — usually, as before,
the children's governess — typed off for him. In this
way, with scarcely any trouble, he collected a great
mass of extracts which he used voluminously in his
own books. Call it " book-making," call it what you
will — the result delighted millions.
And he wrote on a vast variety of subjects— those
books of popular reflections, Ants, Bees, and Wasps,
and all that series embodying his study of the ways
of these insects and other animals, the Origin of
Civilisation and the like antiquarian works, besides
volumes on Proportional Representation, on financial
subjects and so on, representing a vast industry and
a wide grasp. They were all concerned with practical
affairs. Pure literature, literature as an art— did not
interest him, but his style was always easy and agree
able, never forced.
I do not think that it would be correct to say that
he had a profound or a philosophical mind. Had
it possessed profundity, as well as its wonderful
versatility and lucidity, it would have been a super
human mind, transcending the natural limit. But its
lucidity, within the wide circle of its range, was
remarkable, and the ease with which he could switch
it off from the discussion of scientific subjects to, say,
the case of the Peruvian bondholders, was a wonderful
testimony to the ease with which it worked.
It hardly needs to be said that a more delightful

140 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
companion for a country ramble could not possibly
be imagined; What struck me even more than his
facility in answering any question that it might occur
to one to put to him about any of the common objects
of Nature, was his ability to ask himself questions
about what Nature showed him. " Has it ever
occurred to you to wonder," he asked me once, " why
it is that some leaves are so very much more indented
than others — those of the oak than those of the beech
for instance ? " And when I had to confess no, that
I had never thought of it, he said, " I think it must
be because the oak leaf has to be packed up so close,
in such a round bud : the beech leaf's bud is long, so
that it does not require so much folding. If an oak
leaf had no more indentations than a beech leaf,
I do not think that it could possibly unfold without
tearing." Of course it is a very simple instance, and perhaps
a very obvious explanation, but it seems worth noting
as an example of the way in which Nature was con
stantly suggesting questions to him ; and I believe
that this power of setting themselves questions out
of the commonest natural objects must have been a
secret of much of the success both of him and of his
great master, Darwin. He always had a magnifying
lens in his pocket, ready for all occasions, and in
another pocket a book which he would bring out at
odd moments in course of going to and from his
business in the City, and so on. He was a great
believer in the value of turning the odd minutes to
account. Just here it seems to me that I ought to put in a
word of caution, by way of corrective to the impression
which I fear I may be giving of Sir John's character
and of the man generally. I am conscious that I have
been drawing something like the portrait of the ideal
" good boy " of Sandford and Merton, or of some Sun-

FERRETS IN A RAILWAY CARRIAGE 141
day-school chronicle. Sir John Lubbock was a good,
an extraordinarily good man, but he would not have
been allowed to grow up among that athletic sport-
loving brotherhood of the Lubbocks, although he
was the eldest of them, and still be " soft " and a
mere book- worm. He was quite a good cricketer :
if he had remained a year or two longer at Eton and
had not been taken away very early to go into the
bank, he would almost certainly have been in the
Eleven ; and he was, I am told, one of the best fives-
players ever seen. It is even questioned whether he
would not have been better than his brother Alfred,
who was Eton's particular glory as a fives-player.
The Lubbock boys had all sorts of sports in and about
the family house of High Elms. There was a race
course among other " amenities." There were
pheasants in the woods and legions of rabbits. Sir
John was once commissioned by the brothers to
buy some ferrets in London and bring them down to
assist in dealing with the rabbits. He brought them
accordingly, and put them into a Gladstone bag, which
he pushed under the seat in the railway carriage and,
absorbed in his book, had forgotten all about them
until the peace of the journey was suddenly broken
by a wild scream from a lady passenger. The ferrets
had gnawed their way out of the bag and were all over
the carriage. The exercise of Sir John's utmost
suavity and tact, to say nothing of much active and
agitated hunting in all corners and crevices, were
required to allay the storm of terror and indignation.
On another occasion, when he was a good deal older
than the age at which he had been employed as ferret-
purveyor, he had set down his hand-bag for a moment
in the station, and when he came back it had dis
appeared. He complained to the station-master of
his loss. " Ah," said the official, " I am afraid you
will not recover it. There are always rascals about

142 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
waiting for just such an opportunity as you gave.
But what was in the bag, sir ? " " There was nothing
of really great value," Sir John answered; "there
was a German treatise on the Hittite inscriptions "
(I will not be certain that this, precisely, was the
subject of the book, but I know that it was in German
and that its theme was an abstruse one), " and a
paper bag containing some live bumble-bees." " Oh,
in that case," said the station-master, " I think you
may very likely get it back." And, sure enough,
within a very short time a benevolent-looking old
gentleman came into the station carrying the bag,
which he handed to Sir John Lubbock, on the sugges
tion of the station-master, with profuse apologies,
saying that he had taken it in mistake for his own.
Bumble-bees and Hittite inscriptions were pre
sumably not subjects of interest to the benevolent-
looking old gentleman, but the story of the bees, and
of how Sir John came to be thus conveying them about
is rather interesting. It was winter, and he wanted
some of the bumbles for certain experiments that he
was making. Without great hopes of success, he
put an advertisement in Nature, saying that he was
prepared to give any reasonable sum for a few of
them. To his surprise it was quickly answered by a
man who offered to supply them at eighteen-pence
apiece : to which Sir John agreed, and the bees in the
bag aforesaid were the result of the transaction. But
when the deal was concluded, Sir John wrote to the
man who had sold him the bees and said, " Now I
have got all I want, and I should be much obliged
if you would tell me, for curiosity's sake, how it is
that you manage to get the bees, now, in the winter."
To which the man replied, " No ; I think I had rather
keep the thing to myself. If the bees are worth
eighteen-pence to you I may be able to do a good
business in them with somebody else ; so, if you do

HIS BREAKFAST PARTIES 143
not mind, we will leave it as it is." And to the day
of his death Sir John was puzzled as to the means by
which this secretive gentleman had been able to get
his bumble-bees at that season of the year.
Sir John Lubbock's slight figure and rather delicate
appearance did not suggest his possession of such
untiring energy as his various activities witnessed.
At the beginning of the Eighties, that is to say in
1 88 1, he was President of the British Association,
and in the same year was elected President of the
Linnaean Society, which chair he occupied till 1886.
All this while he was in Parliament, was engaged in
his studies of the insects, was attending to the business
of the bank, and, besides, was exceedingly hospitable
and sociable. He was one of the latest survivors
of the breakfast-giving habit, and all sorts of dis
tinguished people used to find themselves, to their
surprise, gathered round his table at the early hour
when most of us feel least disposed to scintillate in
conversation. But the hour of day never seemed to
affect Sir John : he appeared to be at his equable
best at all hours, indifferently.
His first wife was a Miss Hordern, but she had died
just before the Eighties, and in 1884 Sir John had
married Miss Alice Fox-Pitt, a daughter of General
Pitt-Rivers, who had the famous museum of anti
quities at Rushmore, the family home in Wiltshire.
The antiquities had led Sir John to pay Rushmore a
first visit, but it was an entirely different attraction
that induced him to repeat it. The marriage brought
most perfect happiness to both, though Lady Lub
bock's genius was manifested rather in her wonderful
gift for the decoration of modern houses than in
connection with any one or other of the various
studies that occupied her husband's attention. Her
taste in the selection of colour-schemes and furniture
really did amount to genius, and she had more than

144 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
common opportunities for its exercise in the family
house of High Elms, in the Kingsgate Castle on the
Kent coast which Sir John bought and rebuilt
especially for her, and in at least three London houses
which they occupied successively.
One of his secrets for getting through so much
work was his ability to delegate to others all that they
were capable of doing for him. They would gladly
accept these tasks, because of the interest which he
knew how to arouse in them. His own interest and
zeal were always infectious. Thus he set his daugh
ters and their governess to visit the ants, and to write
notes of their doings at fixed hours while he was away
in the City. No single man could possibly have acted
watch-dog for so long, unaided.
He changed very little in appearance from the
Eighties and earlier till his death. As a young man
he had ever looked older than his age, partly
because he wore a beard ; but as an old man his
slight active figure gave him the aspect of being many
years younger than he really was. In heart and mind
he actually did remain young and eager till the end,
always taking a pleasure in showing people the beauties
that his microscope revealed, delighting to answer
questions on scientific subjects ; and within a month
or two of his death he was still able to play his round
of golf.

CHAPTER XIV
SIR THOMAS BRASSEY (LATER, EARL BRASSEY)
THE late Lord Brassey, shortly before his
death, published his autobiography. But
he did not call it by any such title, nor
did his name appear at all on the cover
except as author. He called the book Sunbeam,
R. Y.S., and to those that knew him this meant that
it was his own story that it told.
Many men in history have been much identified
with ships in which they have won fame, yet none
of them, were it Nelson with his Victory, Drake with
The Golden Hind, Sir Richard Grenville with the
Revenge, so closely and so inevitably as Lord Brassey
with his world-famous yacht. His name suggests
the Sunbeam almost as certainly as the name of the
patriarch of the Deluge suggests his Ark.
The Sunbeam was, of course, the love of Lord
Brassey's life among yachts ; but it was not his first
love. That first love was given to the Eothen, and
I rather think there was another. But the Sunbeam
was put into commission first in 1872, and scarcely
ever went out of it. She did duty in the later years
of the war as a hospital ship in India, and is now
serving as a training ship at Pangbourne.
The autobiography does not concern itself with
events in the author's life previous to his becoming
yacht-owner. It is rather as though he thought that
then only did he begin really to live, or, at least,
10 H5

146 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
to live a life worth writing about. It is not for me
to supply the omission, because, of course, it is all a
story much older than the Eighties ; but still there is
one incident of some importance in his boyhood which
I must relate, if only because it illustrates so well
Lord Brassey's humorous outlook and whimsical
way of relating events, especially those in which he
was the chief adventurer. I would premise that
though he told this tale with a perfect gravity, it
is not necessary on that account that it should be
accepted as very truth to the foot of the letter, for
you never quite knew how far he was serious and how
far he was laughing in his sleeve and making sly
trial of your perspicacity in detecting this intention.
It was in the Sunbeam's cabin that he told us :
" When I was about nine — I forget exactly — my
father said to my mother one day, ' My dear, Tom's
getting a big boy ; it's time he went to school.'
" ' Yes, dear,' said my mother.
" ' Where shall we send him to school ? ' my father
asked. ' I should like it to be a school near London,
so that we could go down and see him every now and
then.' " ' Yes, dear,' said my mother again. So their
inquiries were made, and it was found that the
nearest school was Harrow.
"'We will take him there to-morrow,' said my
father. ' Order the coach to be ready directly after
breakfast and we will drive out.'
" So the next morning the coach came round and
off we went, my father and my mother and myself,
and we drove up to Harrow School and my father got
down and asked to see the Headmaster, and said,
1 I've come down with my boy Tom, and I want to
put him to school with you at Harrow.'
" The Headmaster said he was very sorry, but
the school was full.

«^*mw~~~mm0m»...

LORD BRASSEY.

146]

TOM BRASSEY AT RUGBY 147
" ' Dear me,' said my father, ' I'm sorry to hear
that. Could you tell me what the next school is,
along this road ? We'll drive on to that.'
" ' The next school going north ? ' said the Head
master ; 'that would be Rugby.'
" So my father came back to the coach again and
said to my mother, ' My dear, this school is full. We
must try the next. We must go on to Rugby.' So
we drove on to Rugby and found that there was room
there, and that's how it was I went to Rugby."
It is a curious way of selecting the place of a boy's
education, even if we do allow for a little work of the
imagination in its recital, but it seems as if a better
choice could not have been made. Unquestionably
it made a man of Tom Brassey, and that, above all,
is what Rugby education set itself to do. It aimed
at character rather than at very finished scholarship.
I believe that the future Lord Brassey was not kept
very closely at his studies, either at school or at
Oxford, where he was at University College. His
father was abroad a good deal at the time of what
should have been his college days, engaged on big
contracts for the railways in the northern parts of
France, and I think I remember Lord Brassey's
saying that he was much with his father at the time.
Perhaps the father, whose views of education appear
to have been unconventional, thought that the boy
would learn as much of things useful knocking about
and meeting all and sundry and seeing foreign life
in France as he would in the faithful following of
the Rugby curriculum. Perhaps he was quite right.
It must have been due to this experience that Lord
Brassey always maintained a fluency in the French
language, whether for speech or writing.
He was fond of reading all through his life, and was
methodical' in making copious extracts from the books
which appealed to him. His taste was sound, and

148 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
he always liked the best. The consequence is that
he accumulated many volumes of what he called
" Gleanings," several of which have been printed
for private circulation and one published, under the
title of Warriors and Statesmen. He had the extracts
collected and arranged according to their theme, under
headings of which the above is typical. He loved
poetry, and of course he was of the time to fall under
the spell of Tennyson. Tennyson, moreover, was a
personal friend and on at least one occasion Lord
Brassey lent him the Sunbeam for a holiday trip —
which did not turn out an unqualified success.
It is singular how intimately the value to the
nation and to the Empire of Lord Brassey's life and
work, and it is a value which it would be hard to
over-estimate, is associated with the gallant sailing
yacht that he loved. It was out of his love for her
and his sailing in her that the work sprang and grew.
He himself has told us of that birth and growth.
When he was cruising round the coasts of England
and Scotland he was struck by the fearless seaman
ship of the fishermen everywhere. He had an obser
vant eye and a mind which thought much on what the
eye showed him, and very seldom made a wrong
deduction. Thus considering the fishermen, he reck
oned that in them the nation had a potential asset
that might be made invaluable, if rightly organised,
for manning our Navy in the event of war coming
with a heavy demand on our man power. Naval
Reserves already existed — I hope and think that I
am correct in this distinction — but their membership
was restricted to time-expired men of the Royal Navy.
What Mr. Brassey desired — he was not then Sir
Thomas, and it was not till a far later year that he
acquired a peerage — was to bring in these men who
had never been in the Navy, and train them so that
if and when a sudden call came a little more training

THE FRIEND OF HIS SAILORS 149
would suffice to polish them up to the mark of
tolerably able seamen. It was thus that the Naval
Volunteers came into existence, mainly by Brassey's
exertion both in and out of the House of Commons —
he was at this time member for Hastings — and also,
incidentally, by his expenditure of a good deal of
mOney in organisation and in circulating appeals to
the men.
Fortunately he was a very rich man. He was the
eldest son of the great railway contractor, who had
contracted with great profit both to the railway
promoters and to himself, while the whole establish
ment of the railway lines had increased the wealth
and general prospects of the country almost beyond
the most sanguine hopes of its originators. One
may fairly write that this was a fortune fortunately
inherited, by reason of the excellent use to which Lord
Brassey put his money throughout his life.
He was a man of great simplicity, though on
many sides very able, and by virtue of this simplicity
he seemed able to get into friendship with fishermen
or any whom he met. That " terrible gift of fami
liarity," first ascribed, I think, to Mirabeau, and
quoted a thousand times in a wholly unintelligent
manner, was his in large measure. There was nothing
terrible about it in his connection. He was the
personal friend of all his sailors on the Sunbeam ; he
knew their stories, would ask after their wives and
families, and made himself one of them by sharing
in all their work, pulling at a rope, taking a hand at
an oar, and going aloft into the rigging. He continued
this last athletic practice even in old age.
So when he set his heart on getting together the
nucleus of his Royal Naval Volunteers, he had quite
uncommonly good gifts for bringing those ends to
pass. He succeeded in winning Government recogni
tion for them : they had a uniform assigned to them.

150 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
He himself took his own share with them in a six
weeks' drill. They had a great review at Windsor.
And then — they were disbanded ! All his work
seemed to be brought to naught — and why ? For the
reason, which seemed borrowed out of some Gilbertian
opera, that the uniform was so like that of the naval
officers that these last were much incensed about it
all. In reality, no doubt, they were stupid people,
without the foresight and imagination of Brassey.
They thought the whole thing was moonshine and
foolery. They did not believe in the volunteers being
a source of strength in time of need.
So they were disbanded. In 1883, in a change of
mood not at all unusual to the British Government,
they were called into being again, and re-established ;
and Brassey was made a K.C.B. in 1886 for his work
in connection with their establishment. His own
account of it says that all he did for the K.C.B. was
the six weeks' drill which every other member of the
force had taken part in equally, but of course he
had really been the inspiring soul of the whole move
ment. Without him and his energy and his organisa
tion and his liberality, it is likely that we should have
had a great deal farther to seek when we came to
man our largely increased Navy in the Great War.
How much, in that regard, the nation owes the late
Lord Brassey cannot be reckoned with any precision,
but beyond all question the debt is heavy.
And then we owe him the Naval Annual. Exactly
what the value may be of that yearly publication,
again I do not know, but I do know that it is highly
thought of. Its main purpose is the tabulation, in
form convenient for comparison, of the navies of
different countries. The late Lord Brassey started it,
was its owner and editor for many years. There was
a time when he was rather discouraged by finding
that the Germans were bringing out a similar annual,

THE NAVAL ANNUAL 151
in their own language and for their own use, and had
made improvement, as he thought, on his model.
But that mood of discouragement passed : he applied
himself as keenly as ever to the work, stimulated to
make it better, and so again to lead the world, as he
deemed, in all naval matters, Great Britain should
lead. For many years the second Lord Brassey
edited the annual. His tragic and premature death
leaves its fate uncertain.
I have dwelt for a page or two on these two great
services that the first Lord Brassey did the nation in
the establishment of the Naval Volunteers — for they
were really due to him — and of the Naval Annual,
because I do not think that they have been recognised
as fully as they deserve. The principal part of the
rest of his life-work, and most valuable it was as well
as of supreme delight to him, was in the sailing of the
Sunbeam to all parts of the globe, and much of this
side of the story has been told very delightfully by
the first Lady Brassey in that book, The Voyage of the
Sunbeam, which won instant popularity and made the
name of the yacht what is commonly called " a house
hold word." The English speaking world knows all
about this : it has a clear vision of the owner-
captain, a sailor-like figure on the bridge, at one time
or other bringing in his little craft through Trades
and Tropics and Roaring Forties to nearly every
important harbour in the Seven Seas. He stood, and
his ship sailed, for the unity of the Empire and for
Britain's mastery of the waves. She was but of
550 tons, with a draught of 13^ feet, and auxiliary
steam which would propel her at the moderate rate
of some eight knots. But her owner abhorred to
be driven to steam. He loved the sailing, and I
believe the happiest moments of his life were those
in which he could stand at the wheel of that good little
ship and see her responsive, with all sails set, to a fair

152 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
sailing breeze. He was a very bold seaman : he
would not take in a reef till he was fairly compelled
to. I remember very vividly his taking us out in
the very teeth of a gale from Reykjavik in Iceland en
route for St. John's, Newfoundland, with never a
harbour or land of any kind to put in to, unless it
were some ice-bound uncharted place in Greenland,
in all the nine days (as it fortunately turned out) of
our transit. Fortunately, too, the gale and the big
seas proved to be the tail end of a just-passed storm,
but they might equally well have been the head of a
coming storm. As it was, that first night was a
terror of rolling and tossing, for the Sunbeam, though
a very admirable sea-boat, was a very lively one,
with a great weight of lead on her keel which made
her come back off her roll with a quick recovery most
upsetting. And there was a lady passenger on board
— my own wife — whom Lord Brassey promoted on the
spot to the title of " the heroine."
He knew his business perfectly, however, as a
navigator, though he was bold, and it is wonderful
how seldom we hear of that gallant little ship in real
trouble. She was busy in many voyages during the
Eighties, while her owner was a Lord of the Admiralty.
In the winter of 1 880-81 she was in the Mediterranean,
and in the autumn of the latter year cruising round
the British coast ; in 1 883 she went to the West Indies ;
in 1885 she was in and out of the Norwegian fiords,
with Mr. Gladstone as a passenger ; in November
1886 she sailed for Australia, and was there till
December of the following year, Sir Thomas Brassey,
as he then was, being Governor of Victoria.
I should imagine that Lord Brassey went through
his long and strenuous life without creating for himself
an enemy. I, at least, never heard man or woman
mention him except with a smile and a word that
welcomed the reminiscence. He was the kindliest

HIS EXCELLENT CONVERSATION 153
of men, kindliest to all ages, to both sexes, and to all
classes. He was a very true and large-hearted lover
of his kind, and exceedingly generous with his wealth.
He was not in the least like too many rich men whose
generous impulses seem to have been soured by the
many attempts to pick their pockets in the cause of
this or the other charity, whether deserving or the
contrary. He must have been defrauded again and
again in the course of so many years of liberal giving,
yet he remained to the end ready to believe the best,
rather than the worst, of any suppliant.
Yet he had abundant shrewdness. He was really
a little deceptive in respect to this quality, for in his
speech he was always hesitating, with a good deal of
" hum " and " er " between the words and phrases,
so that the listener was apt to grow inattentive and
let his thoughts wander. Subconsciously, too, it
created in the listener's mind the idea that what was
being said was not very clear in the mind of the
speaker himself, who seemed to give out these signals
of indecision. Lord Brassey was perfectly alert to
detect this attitude of mind coming over his listener,
and would suddenly, without any of the " hums "
and " ers," shoot out a question which at once re
called the attention of the auditor, and put him at
some pains to find an answer. After this reminder
he would follow the rest of the harangue far more
closely. And, so following it, he would find himself repaid.
Lord Brassey 's manner and delivery in ordinary
conversation did really intolerable injustice to the
substance of what he had to say. The substance
never failed to be of interest. He was a man who had
seen very much of the world : he had begun to see it
very young, with his father in France ; he had con
tinued to see it in all quarters as he went voyaging
in his yacht. He was a veritable Ulysses of expe-

154 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
rience ; he knew all sorts and conditions of men and
women, and could converse with them all with perfect
and equal ease. And he was naturally gifted with a
judicial mind, capable and apt to weigh these im
pressions and draw interesting and just deductions.
Thus the stuff of his talk was always very good,
but you had to listen attentively to appreciate it,
owing to the hesitating way in which it was given out
to you. Most people do not take the trouble to give
such close attention, and therefore, with the majority,
he did not have the credit for anything like the
acumen which he possessed.
There was none of this hesitation about his set
speeches. He always prepared these with much care,
and delivered them with a dramatic verve which
enhanced the value of their points. There was no
doubt of his ability or of his clear vision then. He was
fond of reading aloud, whether prose or verse, and
declaimed both well. On board the Sunbeam, when
at sea, he read the prayers, and sometimes gave the
crew a short address of his own preparation — all
admirably and effectively done, with deep reverence.
He would take his turn on deck, on a dark, cold, stormy
night, with the hardiest of them. Then he would
deliver them a homily which they listened to with a
reverence equal to his own, because he had shown
himself able and willing to take an equal share in
their toil.
He had the figure of a seaman, not too tall, but
square and sufficiently stout, with a round bluff face,
fringed, in the Eighties and later, with some side-
whiskers, which were only slightly pruned when these
trimmings went quite out of vogue.
He liked his fellow men, and he wished that they
should like him. It was a wish to which they fully
responded. Although towards the end — he died
in the midst of the worst days of the Great War — his

LORD BRASSEY IN RUSSIA 155
outlook was most pessimistic, he was, on the whole,
a man of happy nature. He had very much to make
him happy in the circumstances of his life, though
naturally he did not escape trials and sorrows such
as are the common human lot. The war tried him
cruelly, the more so that he had been an ardent
admirer of the German power of organisation and a
personal friend of the Kaiser. I almost believe that
he would have had us keep out of the war, consenting
to " join a German Zollverein rather than rely on that
broken reed France." This was his quotation of
words that the Kaiser had said to him. " It has
always been John Bull's way, whenever he saw a
fellow getting too big," Lord Brassey added, " to try
to give him a kick. So he is giving Germany a kick
now, and he's got himself into rather a nasty corner."
This was quite at the beginning of the war, when we
were taking Red Cross stores out to Rouen in the
Sunbeam in the autumn of 1 9 1 4. "Yes," I assented
rather grudgingly, for I did not like to admit even
the most distant prospect of defeat, " I suppose he is
in rather a nasty corner for the moment. He's
got to hold on for a bit till Russia's ready ; then I
think it'll be all right."
" Ah," said Lord Brassey drily. " You believe in
the Russ ! "
That was all he said. I was rather indignant at
the doubt cast on " the Russ," in whom I did then,
in common with most British ignoramuses, believe
implicitly. But I have been struck more than once
since by the memory of Lord Brassey's pithy com
ment, for we were all just beginning, then, to talk
of Russia as " the steam roller."
How nasty that corner was in which John Bull
was to find himself, I certainly had not appreciated
then, and bitter disillusionment about Russia followed
for me and very many others. But for Lord Brassey

156 SIR THOMAS BRASSEY
the disillusionment was no less bitter about Germany.
As the months passed, and as it became more and
more evident that she was waging war with a worse
than Hun-like ferocity, that neither the laws of man
nor of God commanded any of her respect, that
" beasts they were and beasts they always will be,"
as so unimpassioned a critic as Mr. Arthur BalfOur
was soon to pronounce them — as all this was made
manifest of the nation to which Lord Brassey had
given his almost affectionate admiration, I think
that his heart failed him, his hope of the world grew
sick, and it was this mental disappointment as much
as any physical trouble that hastened his end.
His passing came at a moment when death was
very busy among us, but it may well be questioned
whether the Reaper claimed another victim whose
loss was deplored by as many friends as was Lord
Brassey's. In 1890 Lord Brassey married Lady
Sybil Capel, his first wife, who was a Miss Allnutt,
having died in 1887. At his spacious Park Lane
house he used to entertain lavishly ; and when he
was not entertaining his own friends the house seemed
always to be lent for meetings to further one or other
good and charitable cause. His own hospitable
designs were admirably aided and abetted by Lady
Brassey, who was the very model of all that a London
hostess should be. His voyages and his Australian
Governorship had brought him acquaintances from
every Colony of the Empire, and they always found
a warm welcome when they came to the Motherland
and sought out Lord Brassey. It was not in Great
Britain alone that his loss was lamented, but in all
the Colonies to which the Sunbeam had ever sailed ;
and I can think of none which she did not at one time
or other visit.

CHAPTER XV
LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
WHEN we were small boys at school we used
to hear of teams of the best rifle shots
in England, Scotland, and Ireland going
off to Wimbledon to shoot for some
mysterious thing called the " Elcho Shield." As
soon as we grew to be bigger boys and arrived at the
age when young human beings begin to ask themselves
something about the meaning of some of the words
that they have been using in a parrot-like way for a
long while past, we were informed that this Shield
was the gift of a certain Lord Elcho, who was "keen
on volunteering," as we said, and had given the Shield
as a challenge trophy to be held by the country whose
team should make the highest score in a special
competition during the great annual week of rifle
shooting on Wimbledon Common. He gave it as an
incentive to make the soldiers and volunteers practise
and improve their rifle shooting. Wimbledon in
those days, it must be understood, was what Bisley
is to-day : the place where the great rifle-shooting
competitions of the year were held. Queen's Prize
men made their names there. Later, as Wimbledon
became more built over and more walked over, and as
rifles attained longer ranges, life and property were
deemed to be rendered insecure by the great shooting
week on the Common. Its venue was changed to the
wilds of Bisley.
The great man of these Wimbledon shooting gather-
157

158 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
ings, no doubt, was the then Lord Elcho. We have
rather forgotten him by that name now, by reason
of all the years during which he was so striking a
figure under the name of Lord Wemyss. He suc
ceeded to the title in 1 883 . Besides, there was another
very well-known bearer of the Elcho title, he, namely,
who is the present Lord Wemyss and was then Hugo
Charteris, and, in the early Eighties, at Oxford.
Lord Elcho — I speak of the Elcho of the Shield —
held very high official rank in those gatherings, for
he was Honorary Colonel of the London Scottish.
This London Scottish Corps had their depot, or head
quarters or whatever it should be called, in a lowly,
corrugated-iron building that was scarcely consistent
with their honourable dignity. But no doubt it
served their ends. And, these volunteers being
Scottish, and seeing the noble expanse of Wimbledon
Common spread out before them, it was but right and
patriotic that they should think the opportunity for
the playing of their national game too good to be
lost. Therefore they laid them out a golf course on
the Common, and instituted the London Scottish
Golf Club, composed, I think, at first of members of
the volunteer corps solely, but afterwards widely
expanded. When rifle-shooting Wimbledon went to
Bisley, the golf club and not the corps became the
chief tenants of what then began to be called the
Club-house. Lord Elcho, as keen a golfer as he was a
rifle shot, was as leading a figure in the golf club
as he had been in the volunteer corps.
He had led that corps because he was its honorary
colonel ; but he had also led it because he was Lord
Elcho — that is to say, a personality. He always
had that great quality, personality, even as a young
man, and as the aged Lord Wemyss he acquired it
in ever growing measure. He had a remarkable
figure, tall, upright, broad-shouldered, always spare

LORD WEMYSS.

158]

"THAT INFERNAL FELLOW" 159
and lean, and of fine slender bones, but large of frame.
His features were yet more notable — Sargent's picture
should have made them known to everybody. There
was a hawk-like character and keenness about them,
and right into the second decade of the twentieth
century he wore those long whiskers — Dundrearys —
which were the fashion of the Sixties. As some one
said of another well-known but much younger man,
also the subject of a very fine painting by Sargent,
Lord Ribblesdale, he looked like a portrait of one of
his ancestors— and a splendid portrait at that.
My uncle, Colonel Hutchinson, who, though not a
Scot himself, had married a Scottish wife, had been
for a time adjutant of the Fife Militia, and in that
capacity had learnt golf at St. Andrew's, took me
down to Wimbledon as a boy to play golf, and there
we met Lord Elcho and I had the honour of playing
with him. I speak of myself now as a boy at that
time : I think I had just gone to Oxford, so probably
I should not have spoken of myself as a boy then.
Naturally Lord Elcho did not remember me, though,
no less naturally, I remembered him, for when I
met him again, long afterwards — he had then become
Lord Wemyss ; and I, though a mere Englishman,
had in the interval impertinently perpetrated some
didactic writing about the national game of Scotland —
he said, " You're not that infernal fellow, are you,
who writes telling people they ought to take the turf
with their iron clubs in the approach strokes ? "
I was " that infernal fellow," and had humbly to
confess it, whereon I received the most awful castiga-
tion from his tongue. Lord Wemyss, to speak of him
now by the title under which he was by this time best
known to all except the small volunteer circle, could
not bear to see turf excised in the playing of the
approach strokes. His own golf dated back to the
days when men approached with wooden " baffy "

i6o LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
spoons, and he both maintained that old tradition
faithfully in his own practice, and also commended
it, with a fine natural force and flow of words, to all
and sundry. He even went so far as to devise a
wooden approaching club with a specially rounded
sole, in order that the turf should be spared by it.
So naturally he castigated me, and thoroughly
enjoyed the castigation, when he caught me and had
me thus self-confessed of preaching the doctrine which
he particularly abominated. I maintained to him,
with such small and shamefaced eloquence as I had
at command, that the ball could be controlled in its
flight, and in its behaviour on alighting, with a jerk
stroke in which the turf was excised as it could not
possibly be controlled with any stroke which followed
through. I might talk — or, to say truth, I was not
allowed to do much of the talking — but of course
made no impression whatever on Lord Wemyss'
conviction, except to deepen the already formed
impression that I was an " infernal fellow." I did
not mind the castigation in the least. I do not think
that anybody ever really minded what Lord Wemyss
said to them, because of that great personality he had
about him. It was a personality as charming as it
was forcible, indeed more so. It was grace rather
than strength, both physically and intellectually, of
which he gave you the idea. Certainly he did not
measure his words. One of the great arguments
which we, the great majority that approach with iron
clubs and cut out junks of turf in the process, used
as against Lord Wemyss' wooden club proposition,
was that junks thus solidly excised could be as solidly
replaced, the roots of the short-rooted grasses not
ruined by the excision, so that when the piece was
restored, like a bit out of a Chinese puzzle, all grew
together again and the turf was not " one penny the
worse." With the wooden club, on the contrary, if

A VERY FREE LANCE 161
the stroke was played in a " sclaffy " fashion and the
turf were taken at all, the consequence was a blud
geoning into little atoms of the portion of soil thus
stricken, with fatal destruction of all grass roots
affected by the concussion. So the controversialists
furiously raged together, with equal heat on the one
as on the other side of the argument, and some wicked
rhymester actually had the audacity to make Lord
Wemyss the subject of an irreverent nonsense rhyme,
as follows : —
There was an old Scotsman called Wemyss,
Whose language was all in extremis.
He approached with the bafiy,
But when he hit ' sclaffy,'
The turf went in small smithereemys.
To " sclaff," it may be explained, means, in golfing
jargon, hitting slightly beneath the ball so as to take
the turf at the same time.
Lord Wemyss never, so far as I know, expressed any
resentment of this gibbeting. Indeed, his own position
was not such as to give him ground to insist on the
most extreme points of courtesy in debate, for he set
no narrow bounds to his own liberty of attack. But
Lord Wemyss could say things in the heat of argument
without giving serious offence which would have been
deadly wounding in another man's mouth. A certain
licence always seemed to be conceded to him. When
he passed, by succession, into the House of Lords, he
was a frequent speaker. Anything that touched the
interests or dignity of his beloved volunteers was as a
gage of battle thrown down to him, and he eagerly
took it up. Now and again their dignity was rather
apt to be assailed. The portly citizen decking himself
out in uniform, with rifle on shoulder, was a subject
that lent itself to humorous illustration. Our great
comic journal Punch has had an almost unblemished
n

1 62 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
political record, apart from party questions, in regard to
which no man or publication can appear without blem
ish from both points of view. It has almost without
exception been on the side of right, and has chastised
with the pen and pencil of ridicule only such things
as are evil. But in this particular case of the volunteer
movement even Mr. Punch's warmest friends will
not deny that he made one of his very rare mistakes.
He held up the unfortunate volunteer as an object of
chronic derision. Perhaps the keenest arrows of
ridicule had already been discharged by the Eighties,
and the points of some of those yet to be fired were
a little blunt from previous use, but still an easy
laugh could be raised by a cheap jibe at the volunteer,
and the poor fellow had suffered so many pricks that
his skin was likely to be in a state of abnormal sen
sitiveness. Be that how it may, Lord Wemyss was
always ready to rise in his place among the Lords
to speak for him — with eloquence, with humour,
often with extravagance.
It was not only the volunteer movement, by any
means, on which Lord Wemyss was ever ready to
address the House in this, his eager characteristic
manner. Any army regulation which affected it
even remotely interested him. He was always in
favour of enforcing that Militia Ballot, which had
been instituted as far back as 1757, and was really a
form of compulsory service rather similar to the
French conscription, though far less drastic. He
was clear-sighted enough to perceive the danger
lurking behind that insidious alliteration " peaceful
picketing," when the legislation connected with the
Trades Unions came on the tapis, and fought it,
though vainly, with all his force. His natural
sympathies were with his own class, yet this sympathy
did not preclude a large and kindly view, and in the
measures passed and projected for regulating the

SURPRISING THE HOUSE OF PEERS 163
relations between master and servant he was earnest
and eloquent in favour of giving to the employed
equal liberty of contract making and of contract
breaking with the employer. And here his eloquence
was not spent in vain. As a Scot, and a large land
owner in the Lothians and in Perthshire, the battle
became a personal one for him whenever the debatable
ground was on the north side of the Tweed. And
further, in addition to these topics of his constant
and, as it were, natural interest he would often surprise
the august assemblage of the Peers by rising to speak
on subjects wherewith he seemed to have no associa
tion whatever. Thus he constantly astonished that
House of Peers, which breathes an atmosphere too
high and rarefied for many such emotions. He
surprised the House by taking part at all in many of
the debates, and surprised yet more by the part he
took. For Lord Wemyss could usually be relied upon
to say the fresh and the unexpected, and to avoid the
obvious and the hackneyed. I have been told that
there was always a little thrill of expectancy in the
House when he rose. But by far the most astonishing
thing of all was the very advanced age to which he
retained this evergreen freshness and originality of
outlook. " My young friend, Lord Wemyss," as
Lord Rosebery spoke of him at a time when he must
have been just knocking at the doors of ninety, even
if he had not already been admitted through it to the
honours of a nonagenarian. It was a humorous
stroke which had every justification. His mind
seemed to be as quickly responsive to a new impression
at ninety and past as it could have been at nineteen.
So the House was delighted when the very striking
and handsome figure of Lord Wemyss rose to its feet
and he began to hurl, it might be, extravagant male
dictions, broadcast. Nobody, that is to say nobody
with an ounce of sense in his head, ever minded Lord

1 64 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
Wemyss' maledictions. There was nothing that was
not excused him ; for no matter what extravagances,
nay even impertinences and almost insolences, he
might utter, it was never possible to forget or doubt
that he was a great gentleman the while. He could
say things without lowering himself from that alti
tude which another might not. In every generation,
as it seems, there are one or two to whom this kind
of licence is given. Lord Wemyss enjoyed his large
share of it in his.
But, of course, a free-lance who wages war in this
guerilla fashion does not write his name so large in the
annals of Parliamentary fame as the leader of a
campaign which sets out to attain some big particular
objective. So far as I am aware, Lord Wemyss'
name was never particularly associated with any
great legislative measure, although he was for very
many years in one or other House of Parliament. At
the beginning of the Eighties he was member for
Haddingtonshire, but, three years later, passed, by
his father's death and his own succession to the
Earldom, to the Lords. He took with him from the
Lower House a fame already established as a graceful
debater, deft in quick riposte, keen in attack. He
had long experience, for he entered the House of
Commons at the age of twenty-three, almost directly
after leaving Oxford. Within less than ten years he
was a Lord of the Treasury. Earnest politicians had
high hopes that he would follow the staid paths
leading to more important offices of State, and no
doubt it was well within his power, had he so chosen,
to attain them. But he chose otherwise. Perhaps he
was of nature too impatient either to bear the trammels
of office or to endure, long or often, the toil needful
to win it. Speaking came easily and was no effort
to him, but all the dull business of preparation and of
" cramming " would have been very uncongenial.

THE PENALTY OF HUMOUR 165
Wisely perhaps, therefore, he took a line of his own in
which such spade work was not required. His great
natural gifts could not have been developed in the
slow processes of sap and siege. His way and his
bent was, rather, to jump in, after the battle had been
solemnly set in array by others, to engage, to deal a
few masterful, brilliant strokes, and so out again !
And neither side, perhaps, could be very confident,
when he entered into the fray, whether they or their
foe was to be object of his attack. It is a mode of
warfare which has its merits : it had the merit, for
one thing, of lightening and brightening debate ; but
it also had the quite obvious defects of its qualities.
And then it is always to be remembered that Lord
Wemyss had the perilous gift of humour, a possession
blessed indeed, both for self and company, in all the
common circumstances of life, but of very dubious
value for the carrying through of any big piece of
legislative business. Just in what measure humour
may handicap a man for the purposes, if he wishes
to take them gravely, of Parliamentary life it would
not be easy to say, but beyond question the handicap
is heavy. It is a melancholy but indisputable fact
that wherever any measure has to be carried by the
consent and with the aid of a large body of men, it is
by a majority of dull men, men who have no apprecia
tion at all of humour, that it has to be put through.
It is not really enough to say that such men have no
appreciation of humour : their attitude towards it,
if they perceive or suspect its presence at all, is more
than negative ; they have a positive distrust of it ;
often they suspect and resent it, when no humorous
intention is in the speaker's mind : they do not know
when he is speaking seriously ; they even doubt
whether such a person is capable of a serious view at
all. Having convicted him once of levity, they can
scarcely credit him with being grave; and at the

1 66 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
back of their minds, perhaps only subconsciously
present, lurks ever the awful apprehension that their
own selves and their own opinions may be the covert
objects of the humorist's attack. The only professed
and accredited humorist that either House of Parlia
ment ever seems to have consented to take at all
seriously in the Eighties was Sir Wilfrid Lawson, but
he was a teetotaller. I have always thought that
this was the saving clause in his case, by virtue of
which the dull majority was able to be convinced that
he was in earnest. Moreover, the great object for
which he was for ever fighting was temperance and
teetotalism, and even to the dullest this presented
itself as an object the most serious and even tragic
that could possibly be imagined, for they were not by
any means a water-drinking majority themselves.
The mantle of humorist which Lord Wemyss wore
so gracefully in the Lords descended upon the
shoulders of his eldest surviving son, then Lord
Elcho, in the Commons. For several years in suc
cession, one of the annual events in the Commons
was Lord Elcho 's speech in favour of the suspension
of the sitting of the House on Derby Day, in order
that members might attend the classic race. He
generally took the line of arguing that their con
stituencies would think far better of their representa
tives if they saw them enjoying themselves like
reasonable beings at Epsom than if they read of them
mewed up in the House passing measures of a very
dubious utility. He always twisted the stock
arguments about with a whimsical ingenuity which
won ready and spontaneous applause, even though
it may not largely have affected votes, an object
to which, be it said, the speaker was entirely indif
ferent. And then — I forget the year, but it was not
very long after the introduction of the Irish Home
Rule Bill by Mr. Gladstone which divided the Liberal

THE DERBY DAY SPEECH 167
Party so that a section faithfully followed their
venerable leader in his Home Rule proposals, while
others, under the title of Unionists, bifurcated off,
seceded, and left him — I was staying at Mells with
Mr. and Mrs. (now Sir John and Lady) Horner,
and Asquith came down on the day after the usual
motion for the adjournment of the House for the Derby
Day. They were stirring political times, all kinds of
agitation were in the air, but he would tell us little
or nothing about Parliamentary alarums and excur
sions, so full was he of Elcho 's speech on the Derby
Day motion.
There had been something almost like a " scene "
in the House. I am not quite certain of the procedure
which led to the situation. The situation is what
matters however. The procedure is a detail, but
I believe it to have been thus : that when the moment
came for seconding the proposition that the House
should sit, instead of adjourning, on the day of the
great race, Lord Elcho rose from his seat so quickly
that he could not fail to be first in catching the
Speaker's eye. He suffered grave rebuke from the
Chair, being reminded that he was out of order, that
it was not the moment for the opposer, but for the
seconder of the proposal to say his say. I believe
that to have been the way in which the situation
arose. In any case, Lord Elcho, unperturbed by the
rebuke, kept his feet and succeeded in putting in a
few words which quite changed the aspect of his
act. He rose, he said, not as an advocate for the
adjournment of the House over the Derby Day, but as
urgently opposing it on the highest grounds of moral
principle. The House was first petrified with as
tonishment, then delighted by the tour de force. Yet
again had Lord Elcho achieved the unexpected, on
a theme which seemed worn tolerably bare with time
and repetition. " Why not ? " was the question

1 68 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
that he asked in very well-affected surprise at the
consternation into which he had thrown his audience.
Why should he not alter his view towards this pro
position ? he asked. It was true that hitherto he
had favoured the postponement of business to
pleasure, of legislation to racing for the one day in
the year. With age he had come to take a different,
a riper view. " Honourable members opposite," he
said, fixing with his eye the very recently converted
group of Gladstonian Home Rulers, and selecting, as
we were told, Sir George Trevelyan for his special
optical attention — " honourable members opposite
have had the courage, I might almost say the audacity
of their changed opinions. Why should I not change
mine ? "
It was a very deft stroke. Of course Lord Elcho,
in the Commons, never got over the effect of that
speech. It was thoroughly appreciated, but it was
impossible that it could be either forgotten or for
given. Whenever he rose to his feet again — and I do
not think that he rose often — a beatific smile must of
necessity go round the House : his Derby Day face-
about must be remembered ; he might talk of what
he would — even, like Sir Wilfrid Lawson, of tee-
totalism, although I do not know that he ever was
at all tempted to stray into that particular by-path —
still the House would persist in keeping that smile
upon its face until he resumed his seat. Even if
he did not actually induce the smile to stretch itself
to a grin, they were always apprehensive that he
would be on the point of so widening it, always fearful
that they might miss the point, and be convicted as
dullards for so missing it ; in a word, they incorrigibly
insisted in regarding him as an incorrigible humorist,
incapable of a serious view — which he was not. He
did some very good work later, on the London County
Council, and much later again, after his father's death,

" MY YOUNG FRIEND, LORD WEMYSS " 169
made a very good speech in the Lords on the truly
awful muddle created by the joint efforts of the Home
and the Indian Governments in the first part of the
Mesopotamia campaign in the Great War. But
no man, since the patriarchs, has ever lived long
enough to succeed in quite living down such a reputa
tion as Lord Elcho acquired by his Derby Day
speeches. In the case of Lord Wemyss, the father, it is not so
possible to turn up Hansard and put your finger on
the page and the paragraph, and say it was here, and
here, and thus, and thus, that the character of a wit
and a popular entertainer of the House, whether in
• the Upper or the Lower Chamber, was won. With
him it was rather the cumulative effect of multitu
dinous small witticisms and whimsicalities ; but the
result worked out much the same in the end. Surely
Lord Wemyss must have greatly enjoyed the know
ledge that the audience which he was about to address
always settled itself down in the comfortable con
viction that some minutes of good entertainment were
before it, but " you cannot have it both ways," as
the colloquial phrase goes : people will not laugh
with you and take you seriously at one and the same
time. There have been witty and humorous men in
Parliament, who have made a success there ; witness
Lord Rosebery himself. It is sure that no one can
read him and still doubt that he is gifted with these
qualities, and yet less can one doubt them who has
heard him as an after-dinner speaker. But he kept
his humour very much below the surface of his
speeches in Parliament and in his utterances on politi
cal subjects even without the walls of Westminster.
Now and again he might indulge himself in letting a
glint strike out, as in the above " my young friend, Lord
Wemyss," or when he remarked, discussing certain
unfavourable comments made about dukes by Mr.

170 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
Lloyd George at Limehouse, that though he, Lord
Rosebery, naturally knew little of dukes, from what
little he had seen of them he judged them to be a
poor but honest kind of people. Now and then he
might let his natural bright light shine forth in this
way, and very pleasant it was when it appeared, but
as a general rule he kept it well hidden under a good
thick bushel of opaque gravity ; and perhaps it is
only on the condition of this voluntary eclipse that
a humorous man can hope to be taken seriously in any
assemblage of men who are taking themselves, and
the purpose for which they are gathered together, at all
seriously. It is a sacrifice which neither the Lord
Wemyss nor the Lord Elcho of the Eighties was pre
pared to make, and both paid, with perfect cheerful
ness and content, the penalty.
I should imagine that Lord Wemyss — I write now
of the father, the great volunteer — found life by far
too variously interesting to settle down to make any
thing like a serious business of politics. He worked
for the volunteer movement, because his heart was
in that and because it made an appeal to his imagina
tion ; he gave to the House of Lords the decently
sedulous attention which became his position ; he
had on his hands all the business which large owner
ship of land involves. He had extensive possessions
in East Lothian, where he built himself the very fine
modern house of Gosford, looking northward over the
Firth of Forth ; and he had a property, besides, in
Gloucestershire, with the delightful old house of Stan-
way, where Lord Elcho lived for many years. This
latter is close to that village of Broadway, which is
perhaps the most famous of all " professional beauty "
villages in the country. Then he loved society, and
to entertain hospitably at Gosford ; he loved art,
and amused himself collecting objets ; he was a
sportsman ; he shot and he played golf ; he travelled ;

A GREAT VOLUNTEER 171
he loved music ; there was scarcely a human interest
to be named which did not make its appeal to him.
Really he enjoyed too many sides of life to be able to
set his face very steadfastly towards any one point of
the compass. Possibly he might have accomplished
more, had he been able, or had he cared, to face more
steadfastly in any single direction, but in that event
he would almost certainly have enjoyed less. And,
when all is said, he did a great work : its extent has
scarcely been appreciated. What he effected on
behalf of the military volunteers may fairly be set
alongside of the work that Sir T. Brassey (afterwards
Earl Brassey) was doing at nearly the same time for
the naval volunteers, to supplement the strength of
the naval reserve. It is not perhaps to be claimed
for him that the land volunteers were in the same
measure the creation of one man's idea and energy
as the naval volunteer force was Sir T. Brassey's
creation. Lord Wemyss did not count for so much
in the strengthening and support of the former as
Lord Brassey in the very making of the latter. He
did not count for so much, but he did count for much ;
and it is a record with which any man might pass to
his rest content, even if he had no other deed well
done to his credit.
It is my immediate business to deal with Lord
Wemyss as a figure, and a very striking one, in a
portrait gallery nominally devoted to a certain decade,
the Eighties, but as a matter of fact his activities
came near to spanning a full century ; he might appear
in the gallery of many decades. He was born in 1 8 1 8,
and in due course went to school at the Edinburgh
Academy. In those days it was not much the way
of Scotsmen to send their sons to English schools.
Nevertheless he went on to Eton and thence to Christ
Church. In 1843 he married a daughter of Lord
Lichfield's. He was in Parliament, as member, of

172 LORD ELCHO AND LORD WEMYSS
the Lower House, from 1841 to 1883, at first for
East Gloucestershire and from 1847 onwards for
Haddingtonshire. For three years, in the Fifties,
he was a Lord of the Treasury. The first Lady
Wemyss died in 1 896, and four years later he married
Miss Grace Blackburn, a daughter of Major Blackburn
and niece of Lord Blackburn. He died in 19 14,
being thus short of the century by only four
years. The Eighties saw him therefore at the height
of his mental power and activity, though in point of
fact scarcely any diminution of his intellectual
faculties could be noticed till very near the end. In
the country he adhered to a style of dress not so much
to be called youthful as personal. It was rather
peculiar to himself. A characteristic of it were very
full and wide knickerbockers, and he claimed to have
been the inventor of these garments without which we
can hardly imagine ourselves going stalking, shooting,
fishing, golfing, or pursuing any of the ordinary voca
tions of a British country gentleman on foot. I do
not know what some of the old " knickerbockers "
of the United States would say to this pretension,
but probably it is at least to be conceded to Lord
Wemyss that by example and precept he brought
these raiments, so very convenient for field sport,
into vogue. We look at our ancestors by Raeburn
or Scott or what painter you will and we see them
going a-fishing in long pantaloons so close fitting to
the leg that the first wonder is how ever the wearer
got into them, and the second wonder how ever,
once in, he is to get out. Similarly we see them por
trayed as going a-shooting in trousers drawn trimly
down by the buttoned strap passing beneath the in
step of the shoe. Either, we may think, they did
not go a-shooting or a-fishing in wet weather or on
any holding and damp soil, or else their lower limbs
must soon have been in a very damp and dirty and

THE FIRST "KNICKERBOCKERS" 173
insanitary condition. On top they were not crowned
in a manner much more convenient, with the eternal
top-hat from which they appear never to have parted.
That top storey of the edifice Lord Wemyss seems to
have left to die its own very natural death in field
and moorland, but we certainly owe him much if it
is due to his initiative that we trudge the plough land
and the heather in knickerbockers and shooting boots
rather than in pantaloons and pumps.

CHAPTER XVI
WILLIAM MORRIS
" r-T^HE idle singer of an empty day." Thus,
1 if you will have a look at the beginning
1 of the Earthly Paradise, you will see
William Morris describing himself. And
he is so convinced of the aptness of the description
that he repeats it five several times. The Eighties
was a period of stress and zeal in politics, science, and
art generally, but if you wished to point to one among
all the prominent men of the time as foremost in
zeal and stressful energy I do not know whom else
you would indicate than William Morris. I once
remarked to one of his few intimate friends that I
wished I had the privilege of knowing him better —
of knowing him well. " Knowing him well ! " he
repeated after me, " you might as well speak of knowing
the North Wind."
It was a very good metaphor for him. He went
past you like the wind, boisterous, bothering about
you not at all, intent on arriving at his own goal,
pushing anybody out of the way to get there. Not
that he was an unkindly man at all — far the contrary.
Not that he was egoist at all — his sympathy for the
working folk and his socialistic campaign are evidence
to acquit him. Only he was so entirely concentrated
in attention to the purpose which he was aiming at
the moment to achieve, that he was indifferent to
all else, would push all else aside, and was indifferent
to anything in the nature of his own personal comfort
more than all. *74

(ByG. F. Watts, R.A.]

WILLIAM MORRIS.

174]

LIKE THE NORTH WIND 175
Thus he was like the wind, blowing every obstacle
out of his way, going " where it listeth " ; and also
he was very much of the North. Distinctly it was a
North Wind. He came upon you with all the tonic
and bracing of the gale from that pole— no soft and
soothing zephyr, with a breath of the lotus flower on
it, but with a keen and biting tang, as if flowing from
the snowy peaks overlooking Scandinavian fiords and
picking up a taste of the briny foam in its passage
across the sea. So he went by you, like a cold gust
of air, and on to one or other of his multifarious arts
and crafts — intensely pre-occupied worker, in many
arts, of a day crowded to the very limit of all its
moments. Many men have miscalled themselves
before : none have ever more widely missed the
mark than Morris in this description of himself above.
Of course we do not take him to have meant it very
seriously. It is a nice, sing-song phrase ; it suggests,
poetically, the idea of some troubadour — though the
Provencals had not yet come on the stage at the date
of this " empty day " that he speaks of — beguiling
the leisure hours with songs of Atalanta and the rest
of the delectable people of that paradise. He never
was" at all meticulous about his phrase. So long as
he could induce it to express his meaning, which was
seldom a very subtle thought, and so long as it was
Saxon rather than Latin phrase, he was content with
it. It was not in his way, nor in his nature, to go at it
again and again with polishing file, to make it brief
or pointed. In so far as that he was " an idle singer,"
and in so far he sang as if the day was " empty " of
all else than his singing, as if he had " all the time
there was " in which to sing his song out — that is
the reason why, no matter how deep our admiration
of Morris's verse, we shall not find many passages in
it apt for quotation. He needed large room for his
singing, and he took it. He did not pack his thought

176 WILLIAM MORRIS
up tight in those neat little parcels which other poets
arrange for us to take away and unpack again, and
set them between quotation marks, to the greater
glory and good advertisement of their makers.
With all my profound admiration of Morris and my
love of his verse, I am not at all disposed to claim for
him a place among the greatest poets. He was very
melodious, but his melodies were not so full and noble,
nor anything like so varied, as those of Swinburne,
who was in some sort his disciple, or of Tennyson. He
was nothing like the equal in mastery of phrase and
technique of either ; or if he had, in fact, somewhere at
command such mastery, he did not produce it for our
edification. Moreover, his rigid faithfulness to the
Saxon words, though it gave his verse a force, yet bereft
it of a greater flexibility and variety which it might
have shown if he had not been so strictly one-tongued.
The best of it all, if I may speak of my own judg
ment, is Sigurd the Volsung. It must have been a
year or two before 1880 that this was published,
for I had the good luck of reading its proof sheets
before publication. That luck came my way because
I was a friend of Cormell Price, the " Crom " of the
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Morris sent the proofs
to " Crom," and " Crom " let me read them, saying
at the time that this would be, in posterity's judgment,
the second epic in the language to Paradise Lost.
So it may. I suppose that posterity has not yet given
its final verdict on Morris as a poet. But he always
seems to me to be greater and to be more at his ease
when dealing with Scandinavian story than with any
other. The world of readers of English may be divided into
two parts : those who love the Sagas and see ultimate
and most entrancing reality in all their myths,
and those to whom the Sagas iseem dull, wearisome,
and unmeaning, untrue tales. I have to confess myself

MORRIS IN ICELAND 177
wholly on the former side. And just as men deem
of the Sagas, so they will deem of Morris, for his
soul was steeped in the Saga literature and feeling,
and his spiritual home was there, in the great wastes
and mountains of Iceland and Norway, the bitter
cold foam and breeze of the northern sea. He wrote
beautifully of classic story in his Earthly Paradise,
and I love his Odyssey and his iEneids. Perhaps the
best of all that he did in treatment of Grecian legend
was that which, if I remember right, came out just
before Sigurd; that is, The Life and Death of Jason.
But I am sure that he was happier when the Norse
men's tales were his theme. He had the very spirit
of them, as it seemed. He had been to Iceland in
1 871, and again two years later : he had visited the
Thingvalla and stood where the dooms were pro
nounced. He never forgot the experience. Norway
I do not think that he ever visited ; but, after all,
it is the island that was the source of the best of the
Sagas and that is still steeped deep in their traditions.
Its position, its mountain ranges, with plains between
strewn with huge lava blocks, its narrow fiords with
the emerald green strips of pasture beside them, all
go to make it the abiding home of Scandinavian
romance, and to guard it from too swift intrusion of
the modern spirit. When I saw it in 191 2, it is true
that the telephone wires, reaching over the lava-
strewn wastes to the scattered farms, gave a strange
air of modernity and scientific apparatus invading the
primitive wilderness, but the very sharpness of the
contrast somewhat served to throw into high relief
the grimness of the waste. Anyhow, there were no
telephones when Morris went there in the Seventies.
At that time he was just touching forty years of
age, but still he was not past the age of impressions
and enthusiasms. It may be said that he never did
pass it. And the importance of an impression
12

1 78 WILLIAM MORRIS
received by Morris consisted in the first and most vital
place in this, that he was wonderfully capable, by
reason of his talent, his impetuosity, and all the
attributes bound up in his very remarkable personality,
of passing that impression on in first instance to the
small coterie of which he was not only a member,
but the very centre of its inspiration, and thence,
by their mediumship or more directly by his writing
or other art, distributing it as a national (and even
wider than national, a more or less universal) posses
sion. I claim for him no less than this. I claim that,
although a minority enjoy his writings and still live
between his wall-papers, and though many hear his
name with reverence and honour, and more or less
know what he accomplished, yet that only a very few,
if any, quite realise in what measure, how widely, and
how deeply the influence of Morris is still about our
path, about our bed and board, and is over all
our ways. If you look here, there, and everywhere
you will hardly rest your eye on an object created
since the day of Morris, which is at all worth resting
it upon, that does not owe something, and very often
the most important thing about it, to his genius.
I say this, with full realisation that it is saying a
great deal. I do not believe that it is saying at all
too much. The papers on our walls, the carpets
beneath our feet, the curtains which drape our
windows, the chintzes upon our chairs and sofas, the
forms of our furniture, our chairs, our tables, our beds,
our table-glass — all owe their debt, usually a large
debt, and the larger the more beautiful they are, to
Morris. Every colour scheme by which we are
surrounded in nine houses out of ten is his, realising
in more or less imperfection his idea of the House
Beautiful. It almost goes without saying that few
pictures painted since the Pre-Raphaelites formed their
brotherhood would have been just what they are had

HIS DRIVING FORCE 179
William Morris never lived and painted and been the
fervid inspirer and goader on of other painters. He
was a driving force as well as infectious exemplar
of energy to all whom his gusty north-windy tem
perament breathed upon. Swinburne I have claimed
as in some sort his disciple in another branch of the
arts, though far excelling the master in the art which
they had in common ; and from Swinburne we may
derive much of Kipling, and from these two, therefore
ultimately from Morris, how many legions of pious
devotees ? Kipling very likely owed to him quite
directly, for Kipling, as a boy, was much in touch with
all the set that he would meet at his uncle Burne- Jones's
house, though perhaps it was not there that he picked
the gems which he wove into Barrack Room Ballads
and the like firstfruits of his wonderful head. There
was one Muse that, so far as I know, did not attend
Morris's christening and shower her gifts upon him :
this was the Muse of music. He loved it, I believe,
but did not set his hand to it. All the rest of the
sisterhood were at the ceremony and in their most
freely giving mood. I am sure, had he been so drawn,
he would have set his hand to some musical instrument
or composition, for the one thing that he never could
abide was to be a spectator, to look on and see " the
other fellow " work. He must put his own hand to it.
The modern taste seems to have gone a little past
the Morris wall-papers now ; we are apt to find their
spaces too crowded ; we ask a little more rest for the
eye. But, apart from the this or that of form and
colour that Morris has given for our eyes to dwell on
round about us, it is a bigger gift than this, a gift not
of details, but of a general point of view, that he has
been so forcible in bestowing on us : that is, the appre
ciation that there actually is a beauty which can make
a difference to our lives in forms and hues. It is an
appreciation which we know quite well to have been

180 WILLIAM MORRIS
hid from the eyes of very many of our forefathers, and
it is our great debt to Morris that he has been so
largely the means of freeing our own eyes from the
like scales. The early Victorians had something
of the sour look of the Puritans towards any work
of art. The forms and hues among which they lived
bear abundant witness to that unhappy attitude of
mind. Even Morris himself had to encounter and
overcome some opposition on the part of his family
when he announced his intention to follow art, at first
in the noble form of architecture, instead of the
Church, as his profession. His early inclination,
however, towards the religious life had its manifest
influence on him throughout. His interest in church
architecture, church brasses, church music, church
rites, and painted windows was formed in his early
years and never left him. All pageantry appealed
to him. We are told that as a small boy one of his
prized possessions was a child's suit of armour, and,
donning this, he used to go riding on his pony, a
knight errant in little.
So his mind received its bent, and all through his
very varied work in life, all through the devious ways
along which it led him, we see at least this unity binding
the many aims together in the one personality —
a deep love of the mediaeval. He looks to reform the
world by leading it back to mediaeval beauty. Really
this is the keynote. He himself strikes it keen and
clear for us in the Prologue of The Wanderers :
Forget six counties overhung with smoke.
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town ;
Think rather of the packhorse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green ;
Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves
Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves.
Cut from the yew-wood on the burnt-up hill,
And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill,

"TOPSY" 181
And treasured scanty spice from some far sea,
Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery,
And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne ;
While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen
Moves over bills of lading — mid such times
Shall dwell the hollow puppets of my rhymes.
Those are just the times and just the scenes in
which he did love to let the puppets of his thoughts
dwell. He was a mediaeval, and of all the mediaeval
scenery in which his mind moved it was most at home
in that of the Northern fells and fiords. He had no
Scandinavian blood in his veins, as I believe, but he
had his Celtic inheritance, from the Welsh. His
forebears had styled themselves Ap-M orris. Save
for such artistic stirrings as such blood must, as it
seems, bring, he does not appear to have had any
large artistic heritage, unless it were in music, which,
curiously, made less vivid appeal to him than other
arts and crafts. Personally he had a good deal of
the look of a Scandinavian, almost of a Viking, with
that towzled head of hair which got him the name of
" Topsy " as early as Oxford days, and his big frame
and quite uncommon strength of muscle. He had a
passionate temper, too, which was rather primitive,
and with his strength he must have been a terrible
fellow to offend. And in equal measure, by compen
sation, he had the joyous love of life.
I have written of him as engrossed in his projects
so as to have little thought to spare for the personal
concerns of other people, or even for his own ; but
it would give a wrong idea if that were to convey
that he had not warm affections. In his own family
he was very loving as well as very much beloved,
and no one can well say that he had no capacity of
warm friendship who is aware that when he and
Burne-Jones were not living under one roof in London,
and yet were within reach of each other, they never
failed to breakfast together on Sunday mornings, and

1 82 WILLIAM MORRIS
to spend all the forenoon in talking — de omnibus rebus
et quibusdam aliis. He was a man of few friends, but
to those few he was very dear and they were very dear
to him. His letters to Cormell Price show a great
affection. In fine, the few friends he had counted
for a great deal more with him than do the many
friends of a more friendly man. Outside the circle
he had many acquaintances perhaps, many people
who knew and recognised him, but very few whom he
knew or recognised as he went through the streets in
a terrific hurry, with his eyes, under the shadowing
brim of his squash hat, bent inward, on his thoughts.
Yet if any detail of architectural or other beauty
caught that eye, that detail was impressed very deep.
He did not lose it again.
But he would hardly ever be seen in those parts of
the town frequented by the people who called them
selves " the world." He seems to have carefully.
coasted round them, as a kind of dangerous centre,
to be avoided. Thus he was brought up, in boyhood
at Epping, or close by. Then, with Burne-Jones
and some others of the brotherhood, he was in Red
Lion Square, W.C., and Queen Square. Again we
catch sight of him out in the Holland Park" direction,
and in Bayswater. Again in Hammersmith, es
tablishing his printing shops, and at Merton Abbey.
Thus he carefully skirted round the danger zone
where men wore that ridiculous head-piece the high
hat, and that no less absurd toga the frock coat.
It is worth while looking for a moment at the
programme that he put out of the work to be done at
Merton, in order to see how various it was. Or, at
least, I will say that it is worth my while to cite it,
in order to endorse my claim of a few pages back
about the almost universal extent of Morris's effect
on the houses in which we live to-day :
(i) Painted glass windows; (2) Arras tapestry

A MEDIAEVALIST 183
woven with high-warp loom; (3) Carpets; (4) Em
broidery; (5) Tiles; (6) Furniture; (7) General house
decorations ; (8) Printed cotton goods ; (9) Paper
hangings; (10) Figured woven stuffs; (11) Furniture
velvets and cloths ; (12) Upholstery.
He never embarked on any of these ventures for
money's sake, for his father had been a rich man and
he had enough. Yet he wished to make them an
economical success as an object-lesson. His great
idea for the regeneration, both of crafts and of crafts
men, out of the ugly monotony to which mechanism
and the conditions of modern industry had reduced
both the one and the other, was that the workman,
for a fair wage, should do a fair day's work at labour
which should interest him. It is a lovely idea. Like
almost all of Morris's ideas it was mediaeval. It was
an idea entirely unsuited for to-day's conditions.
It was all very well when industry was called on to
support relatively few workers, when the population
of the world was scanty. It is an idea which may
perfectly well be realised again if the world consents
to cut down its human population to something
like its figure when the mediaeval conditions pre
vailed, and when the workman was an artist and
worked on the product of his hands for the love of its
beauty and the zeal of creating. That is a very far
more pleasant way of life for the worker. But at
present there is no sign that the world proposes to
seek its salvation on such lines : the lines on which
it is working are still to increase and yet further to
increase populations ; and it seems that such multi
tudes can be fed only on the condition that work shall
be done in circumstances which make life doubtfully
worth the living. That, at least, is the view that
Morris took of it. And the circumstances are cer
tainly no more pleasant for the worker, in the way of
making his work more interesting to him, than they

1 84 WILLIAM MORRIS
were in the Eighties, though he has the very con
siderable advantage of a larger wage and more
leisure. I have to confess — I feel the confession to be almost
impious — very little affection either for Morris's type
of socialism or for the products of his Kelmscott
Printing Press as practical things. I have the greatest
admiration for them in the abstract. The Dream of
John Ball, and so on, are beautiful, as dreams. They
were beautiful realities in the Middle Ages perhaps ;
but to-day they " won't work." His theories are
laughable, considered as solutions of to-day's problems.
Similarly the Kelmscott Press productions are things
of perfect beauty : they entrance us to look at as we
turn their pages, while they lie in their majesty on a
table. But when we try to deal with them as a
book — that is to say, as a vehicle to our eyes of the
printed thought of the author — they are frankly a
failure. They are immense : two hands for a reading
desk are required to bring them within reading range
of our eyes ; they are as ill adapted to our modern
use as his socialism. I hate writing thus, because of
the almost hero-worship that I feel for Morris ; but
it is no use trying to draw a portrait of a man and
instead of his own snub nose giving him some one else's
Roman, because it looks more handsome.
It was in the Eighties that he was most actively
engaged in his socialistic campaign. It need not be
said that the idea which inspired him was noble : he
had a warm and a generous sympathy with all whom
he saw to be squeezed nigh to death in the great
modern industrial machine. In very many of his
writings we may hear the note of the relief of suffering
ringing like a trumpet call to action, and this inspira
tion of the knight errant he brought into his pro
jected schemes of industrial reform. That they
progressed no farther than the project stage was not

PROSE ROMANCES 185
the fault of any lack of enthusiasm. The fault was
in the schemes themselves, that they were not fitted
to their times.
When the theme was not socialism, which we may
rejoice that it seldom was, his prose was no less
poetical than his verse. It was fully as inspired by
fancy and by the spirit of romance. I have said that
he was no subtle poet. There is no weaving and inter
weaving of thought with a complexity in which the
pattern is very difficult to follow, as in Browning.
There is a big simplicity about it, and it is almost
always narrative, never introspective. It is all simple
to read, in spite of the air of mannerism which is
given by his love of the Saxon and sometimes archaic
word. For " hanap " e.g., which means a cup,
usually of wood, many a reader will want a
dictionary. When he ground stories out from the stocked mill
of his own head he generally wrote them in the prose
form. He went into verse more when he was translat
ing or transcribing. Greatly as I admire his verse,
and his Sigurd particularly, I love his prose romances
more — The Well at the World's End, The Roots of the
Mountains, The Wood beyond the World, and so on.
What a flair he had for a title that takes you at once
into a realm of romance and invites you to go with
him through it ! He sets you wondering, from the
start. He came into his literary heritage very early.
Almost the best are the Early Prose Romances, The
Hollow Land, and the "rest of them. And although
I have written that he was not a very quotable poet,
still it must be allowed that he interjected into the
prose of these early stories some verses which haunt
the memory, very persistently calling to be recited,
and which were in fact constantly in recitation on
the lips of his friends of that time. They were pub
lished in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

1 86 WILLIAM MORRIS
Take this for example : —
Christ keep the Hollow Land
Through the sweet Springtide ;
When the apple-blossoms bless
The lowly benfhillside.
Christ keep the Hollow Land
All the Summertide ;
Still we cannot understand
Where the waters glide.
Only dimly seeing them
Coldly slipping through ;
Many green-lipped cavern mouths,
Where the hills are blue.
For sheer beauty and hinting of a picture to haunt
the mental eye these lines are not easily to be beaten.
And again, there are those others from the same tale.
One is heard singing :
Queen Mary's crown was gold.
King Joseph's crown was red ;
But Jesus' crown was diamond.
And lit up all the bed Maries Virginis.
Ships sail through the heaven
With red banners dress'd.
Carrying the planets seven
To see the white breast Maries Virginis.
Even if literature's debt to Morris was no more than
what is due for his translation, with Magnusson
collaborating, or by his own hand as he grew to know
the Icelandic better, of the great Sagas, it would be
large. His Grettir the Strong keeps wonderfully
what we must believe to be the spirit of the original.
His English was so individual and so little borrowed
that it is hard to liken it to any other writer's. In
form of sentence it suggests Carlyle now and then ;
which we may perhaps take to be because both

HIS UNSUSPECTED INFLUENCE 187
followed the Teutonic, so much more than the Latin,
of the diverse elements of our speech ; but the writer
of whom he reminds most, though here again the
reminiscence is only occasional, is Cobbett, of the
Rural Rides. Here again the reason, doubtless, is
that Cobbett loved the pure Saxon and always used it
of preference when it would serve him for what he
had to say.
Of the men prominent in the Eighties Morris is
certainly one of the most remarkable, on whichever
of the many sides that he presents we may consider
him ; and certainly it is he above them all that has
made most difference in the surroundings of our daily
life. Others, especially Darwin, who died very early
in the period, have modified our mental outlook far
more deeply ; but, little as we may be aware of it, the
influence of Morris is scarcely ever absent from us in
our homes.

CHAPTER XVII
SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
WHEN Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton took
Swinburne to lead the sheltered and
suburban life he no doubt deserved well
of the world and of the poet himself,
but it was a fearful and a wonderful thing to do.
The very name of the house, " The Pines, Putney Hill,"
was pathetic as the home of a flaming genius whose
proper address would be " The Rigi, Switzerland."
It was like taking an eaglet from the eyrie and putting
it in a hen-coop.
Not that this particular eaglet seemed to mind.
He appeared to domesticate himself, very readily, to
the surroundings of Putney Heath, and tripped about
them with his peculiar short-stepping gait quite
happily. Did his verse lose fire by it ? One can
hardly say. Even at its least fiery it had inspiration,
and to spare. Watts-Dunton 's devotion, at all
events, was very touching. It was as whole-hearted
as it was rare, and we cannot suppose that at all times
the poet was quite easy to live with. People with the
" temperament " seldom are.
There is no doubt, moreover, that this eaglet was
quite unable to fly, or even to walk, alone. He
needed a guiding, sustaining hand, and he would not
allow his own family to extend that hand to him.
It is not very evident that they would have done so
if he would. His Bohemian ways were not at all
those of the patrician nest in which he was reared.
188

"THE PINES," PUTNEY HILL 189
Beyond question, Watts-Dunton saved him from
himself, and from the irregularities into which he had
fallen. It was just the kind of steadying influence
that he needed. Almost physically and literally he
needed a hand. He never did so much walk as trip
on his peculiarly small feet, and they always seemed
not quite adequate to his support. His head was
quite splendid, with its apparent size increased by the
redundant way in which it pleased him to wear his
hair. His body looked too small for the fine head, and
the feet too small, again, for the body. It was as if
Nature had started off with the head-piece and had
spent so much care on its modelling that she grew in
creasingly tired of the job as she worked downward,
and so finished him off with a pair of child's feet that
she found lying about. He looked always ready to
tumble, and the first time that I met him he actually
did tumble, and hurt himself severely, down the stairs
from the billiard-room at the hotel at Westward Ho !
That must have been rather before the Eighties,
and before the Consulship of Watts-Dunton. It
was during the Eighties that he went to live at " The
Pines," and from there he published much during
the decade — Mary Stuart, Tristram of Lyonesse,
Century of Rondels, Midsummer Holiday, Marino
Faliero, Miscellanies, Locrine, among the poems ;
and I think it was then that he was engaged in that
painstaking analysis of Shakespeare's methods, which
produced his Study of Shakespeare and Age of Shake
speare. Perhaps it was not such flaming stuff as
some of the Poems and Ballads ; but for most men it
would serve, and surely it was good singing for Putney
Hill. Of course Watts-Dunton himself was a poet,
although he was not a Swinburne, and his prose, in
the instance of Aylwin at all events, was quite as
poetical as his verse. There must have been much
give and take between the two friends, however we

190 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
may think that Swinburne was the greater giver.
That is spoken, of course, of the intellectual exchange.
In material and moral ways it was otherwise, perhaps.
Swinburne, as we all know, began with the Pre-
Raphaelites. He was the singer then of protest
against all that was conventional, all that was
tyrannical; against kings, priests, and lawgivers in
every garb. It was a spirit of terrific iconoclasm,
strangely incarnated in the small but great-headed,
tripping figure. He was a perpetual delight to friends
of his own way of thinking — that is to say, of the
iconoclasts — a perpetual terror as to what he might
do or say next to those not of that way, and especially
to those who cherished and respected the idols.
These last were heartily relieved when he passed
under the brooding wing and was taken to the
domestication of Putney.
Beaudelaire and his like, I suppose, were Swin
burne's earliest influences. Then came the distinct
Victor Hugo phase — the worship of the heroic, the
compassion for the toiler, the identification of
heroism with toil. Something of all this is expressed
in Songs before Sunrise. But it is curious : the small
personality and the burning passion of it all seem not
to be of a piece. Of course that appearance only
arises from our almost consciously imperfect way
of viewing such relations. In truth, however, genius,
especially the poetic genius, is the very quality
which defeats and upsets, by reason of its originality,
all our formed concepts of relations. We may almost
say that it is just this upsetting which makes it genius.
Swinburne caught something of the mantle of these
earlier singers — a fringe from the robe of Rossetti,
and also of Morris, were about him too — but he* was
not therefore to be called a borrower. He took their
forms ; he was always experimenting, and nearly
always successfully, with strange techniques in verse,

HIS MESSAGE (?) 191
even with that terza-rima of which the Ettrick
Shepherd observed with point that it was " an infernal
measure " ; but he expressed his own thought and
white-hot emotion. Of course he borrowed the old
stories in his narratives and dramas, as Tristram
and Mary Stuart; but every one is a borrower in
that sense. All the stories have been told a thousand,
times : only now and then some inspired teller, like a
Kipling, comes along and tells them in a new manner.
Swinburne, at worst, might take to himself that
moderate encomium bestowed on a very different
poet : Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. And he ornavit
in very truth. It is a marvellous cascade and wealth
of words that he pours out in melodies most entranc
ing. We actually hear the waves of his dear ocean —
" Mother and lover of men the sea " — with her pearly
surface, her opalescent depths, her eternal mystery,
and her moaning as with eternal sorrow. He takes
us to some island of the Lotus-eaters, where " it is
always afternoon." He laps us in slumber ; he fires
us with passionate emotion. He shows us " the
light that never was on land or sea." And then it
occurs to us to ask : What does it all lead to ? What
does it all mean ? What is its message ?
We find ourselves strangely at a loss for an answer.
His message seems to be just as empty of any affirma
tive sense as that of Bolshevism. He is ready to
crack all crowns, to knock down all conventions, but
we never win from him any definite idea of how he
would propose to rule the world when this is done.
He gives us splendid visions, glorious music ; and
that seems to be about the end of it. Still it is very
much, and if we thus criticise in the name of truth,
we need not lose our sense of gratitude in the criticism.
He was critic himself too, and assuredly he did not
err in criticism on the side of forgetting gratitude —
that is, be it said, when his criticism was approving.

192 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
Indeed he was so enthusiastic in approval and in
gratitude that the balance needed for sane criticism
was sometimes lost. Nor was it otherwise when the
criticism was disapproving. Disapproval left no
room at all for gratitude then : indeed he could not
see that any claims on gratitude remained. As critic,
therefore, although he is so appreciative, or tren
chant, as the case may be, and gifted with an insight
born of sympathetic imagination and of trained
experience far beyond most, he still stands liable to
be corrected in his verdicts by more prosaic persons,
to whom these scintillations of genius do not come
with their bedazzlement. We may learn from his
criticism in a thankful spirit, and yet may venture
to give it only a qualified endorsement.
The language of his prose is only less splendid than
his poetry. There have been very few such wielders
of the English word, in either mode. He lived and
wrote long beyond the decade with which I am trying
to deal. His death came in 1909, watched over by
his ever faithful friend, who survived him. He was
an old man, past the age that the Psalmist has allotted
as our mortal span ; and it is most unlikely that he
would have reached it had it not been for the touching
care and devotion of that friend. It is due to the same
cause, no doubt, that he was able to leave us so large
a legacy of song. No man of letters has ever been more
fortunate in this respect than Swinburne ; none has
ever had the material worries of life so cleared from
his path nor has been able to give himself up with
more complete detachment to his calling. We have
to remember that not only was the bulk of Swinburne's
poetry very large, but that his verse was often cast
in forms which required very attentive workmanship.
It has the air of running easily off the pen, but we
know that this is but an instance of the perfection
of art concealing the effort of art. The metres were

GEORGE MEREDITH 193
often difficult and elaborate and not to be framed by
even the most practised and inspired hand without
much labour and polish.
As I read over the foregoing lines, I have a guilty
feeling that I have been unjust to Putney Hill. The
name has a suburban sound, but in the Eighties, at
all events, Wimbledon Common, at the eastern edge
of which is Putney Hill, was a place of unbelievable
beauty and wildness to be so near Charing Cross. In
some of its birch-crested, heather- and gorse-clad
ravines you might believe yourself in Scotland. If
only you could forget, and imagine — and a lesser
poet than Swinburne might do this — it was not so
unromantic a setting after all.
MEREDITH
How it may be with others I cannot say, but for
my own part I find that when I come back to a novel
by George Meredith, not having read one of his for
some while, I always find after I have finished a page
or two that I am asking myself how it is possible that
I have ever wasted my time reading any other novels
when I do not know by heart all those of this amazing
man. That is a mood which endures during half, or
it may be three quarters of the book, and then I find
that I begin to slacken a little, not in my wonder and
admiration of his sheer cleverness, but in zest of
interest about the characters. I grow critical, which
I never was at first — criticism being swallowed up
in admiration — and ask myself whether the characters
are real, whether they and the situations in which they
move are possible. That is not the kind of question
about which it concerns us to seek an answer in many
novels ; but George Meredith is such a realist that he
demands that everything in his stories shall be real.
The romantic haze is not their atmosphere. He
wants all clear-cut.
'3

194 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
I know I am uttering heresies in the view of the
pure Meredithian. For one thing, the pious devotee
of those works would never be in my position : would
never let the fire of his cult die so low that he would
come to any novel of the master as to a new thing.
But, also, the word realist applied to that master
would not be allowed. The disciple would claim
him as the prince of idealists. But I mean realist
as a term of pure praise. I mean by it that
Meredith strives and toils and polishes, with chisel
and file, to make all most actual ; he elaborates
phrase upon phrase in the endeavour to make clear
to us the definition and the interfusion of " the fine
shades " of those ladies who so intolerably patronise
Emilia in England ; he idealises, and then he works
and works to make that most idealised motive or
sentiment as real as, say, the posed figure of Roy
Richmond for the statue of the German prince.
That is what I mean by his realism, and it need not
conflict with the purest conception of his idealism.
It is indeed but the finish of it — the last word.
Refining thus, however, he does grow, if not obscure,
at least difficult. We begin to wonder, too, whether
this extreme clairvoyance into emotion and sentiment
is the real thing. Even if that wonder is subconscious,
still it is there, subconsciously suggesting scepticism
whether the atmosphere is quite real, whether it is not
a little too translucent for life. We live our common
life in rather a haze; Meredith would take all that
sometimes kindly fog out of it and bring outlines clear
and distances close as we only see them on a day when
the glass is very low and the air is made lucid by a
great mixture of water vapour. As we read we almost
begin to wish for some of the Scottish mists of Sir
Walter, or even some murk of the " London peculiar "
as served out by Dickens or Thackeray.
Coming to details, and to plain speaking, though

GEORGE MEREDITH.

194]

SOME OF HIS CHARACTERS 195
plain speaking is not quite the Meredithian way,
did any people ever live as some of his people are re
lated to live ? For example, in Harry Richmond we
have the question arising whether it be possible to get
rid of the Countess, from a house in which she is a
guest, within a month. And she had already been
there for a good long visit ! Did people in those days
— and they were not days of so very long past— stay
so interminably ? Then is the Countess possible ?
Are any of those three sisters possible? Or again,
are they possible in their reincarnation in the three
sisters in Sandra Belloni? Of course they are the
same three, equally as of course Roy Richmond is
another incarnation of " the Great Mel." Meredith
was economical. He would invent his characters
once, and then he would make them serve twice, or
even more often. Possibly there is some auto
biography about the three sisters and the magnificent
parent. I do not know, but it has been so hinted.
A good deal about Meredith's early life has not been
told us. Why should it be, if he had any reticence
about it ; as it is exceedingly natural that there should
be reticence. We marvel at reticence about any one's
private affairs to-day, and are apt to suspect all kinds
of mystery behind it in these times when no affairs are
private, and all the secret details of domestic life are
set out in public print. It was not so in Meredith's
early years. He was born in 1828, and lived until
1909. Thus he enjoyed his full span. We do know this,
of his boyhood, that he went to school in Germany :
and that is of interest, for it lets us into the secret
of his knowledge of the little German Court in which
Ottilia was bred, to be the worry of Harry Richmond's
soul. It also gives us a hint of the origin of some of
the occasional obscurity of his style. It is cast in
Teutonic forms, now and then. By reason of his
obscurity, he has been likened to Browning ; but the

196 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
resemblance is perhaps too obvious to be profound.
Browning's thought comes crowding on thought in
such hurry that the last seems to impede the articulate
utterance of the one foregoing. And sometimes he
is obscure because he tries to pack his thought into
such few words that it really has not room to show
itself. Also it is thought of a very deep nature,
often of the nature of divinity. Meredith is concerned
with the nature of humanity purely, which is a
difficult matter enough, but not quite so high nor so
deep. It is true that the divine in man is his quest,
but he does not travel quite so far into the ultimate
mysteries as Browning. Neither does he pack his
thought so tightly. Really it is his poetry which is
obscure rather than his prose, although the man who
claims full understanding of all the first chapter in
the Egoist is bold. There is no obscurity about
some of the later published verse, such as that volume
in which Love in the Valley is probably the best
known piece. And well does it deserve to be known
— a beautiful lilting metre, and delightful thought !
But certainly some of the Poems, published in 1851,
are difficult. Probably it would come as a surprise
to most readers to find how large was George Meredith's
production of verse. That is because he was, and
is, so far better known, as he deserves, in the role of
novelist. His first published essay in pure literature
was, I think, in verse, namely a poem called " Chillian
Wallah," which came out in Chambers's Journal in
1849. In all justice to both " obscurantists," it is
only just to say that they could be lucid enough
when they so chose. There is no mystery about the
way in which they " brought the good news from
Ghent to Aix," for example, any more than in Love
in the Valley.
Just as we trace the source of some of Harry
Richmond to Meredith's school days in Germany, so

HIS POPULARITY (?) 197
we may find some hints as to his Emilia in Italy in
the fact that he served as correspondent to the
Morning Post in the Austro-Italian war. Some
of these letters might, be well worth republishing, if
only for the sake of the Meredithian phrase and point
of view, and they would be of particular interest at
this moment when Italy has won her own back again
from the " White-Coats."
It is rather difficult to say whether it would be
proper to speak of Meredith as a popular writer, even
now. He has earned an appreciation which is very
much better than mere popularity : that goes without
saying ; but his books are scarcely to be counted in
the ranks of the " best-sellers." He was winning
his slow way to the recognition of his genius all
through the Seventies, but the novel which is certainly
one of his greatest, Richard Feverel, was published
as far back as 1859. In the early Seventies Beau-
champ's Career, which is said to be that work of his
hands which he, personally, rated highest, was coming
out serially in the Cornhill Magazine. The most
Meredithian of them all, as it has been called, The
Egoist, appeared in 1879. This is regarded by those
of the true faith as the touchstone, the test piece : if
you can conscientiously write yourself an admirer
and appreciator of The Egoist, you are ready for
admission at least into the Outer Court of the Temple.
If you fail to answer to that test, you are lost to hope.
And surely it must be a very dull person who cannot
admire " with much amazement " the relentless skill
with which the author of this wonderful book has
stripped the skin of self-satisfaction from what little
of soul there is in his Sir Willoughby Patterne, and
left it so bare for his dissection. The crowning
triumph and testimony to his unrivalled science as
an operator in this kind is that the small soul of the
man who supposed himself so great is found, thus laid

198 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
naked, to be not altogether an unlovely thing. It
has its pathos : it is a thing that moves our pity
rather than our scorn. It would have been an easy
task in comparison, as we may suppose, to show it
altogether ugly and base. But he has not made it
so ; and that is how it is that it is such a very human
soul, after all. It is a holding of the mirror up to
nature withal ; for he must be either a very perfect
or a very blind man who cannot see in that soul, thus
exhibited, qualities which he may now, for the first
time, detect, with shame, in his own. If there be a
moral purpose in Meredith's writing, it is surely this —
to lay pretension bare, to expose it for what it is and
make us see it as a loathly thing which we have to
slough off from us, like an out-grown snake's skin ;
and in none other of his books does he accomplish
this end quite so perfectly as in this amazing
Egoist. I have spoken of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
as one of his greatest novels. To the person whom
I have called the true Meredithian I believe that The
Egoist must seem greatest of all. Meredith himself,
as we have seen, gave first place to Beauchamp's
Career. But in the opinion of such general public as
he commands I suppose that the novel which he
published in the middle of the Eighties, Diana of the
Crossways, is that which will be ranked together with
The Ordeal as showing his genius at its very highest.
He is a very earnest and interested student of women ;
that is seen in every one of his books without exception ;
and the best, the most true, the most lovable perhaps,
in spite of her one desperate and yet truly feminine
act of treachery, in the revelation of the State Secret
to the great editor, is Diana. Diana is avowedly
the presentment, in fiction, of the famous Mrs.
Norton. I suppose that it is impossible to affirm
how exact the portrait is : probably Meredith himself

VAIN COMPARISONS 199
would not claim precision in the outlines and the
shades. The most that he would ask us to admit is
perhaps that he has given us a character which
expresses the fascinations and the weakness of its
original. Whether it is exact in material detail I
presume it is hardly worth inquiring. It was not
his purpose to make a contribution to history. In
the main his purpose was, as I take it, to show a
woman of a character which would explain to us Mrs.
Norton, as he imagined her to be, and in the scenes
wherein he gave her a role. We cannot, at the very
least, deny that he has given us the picture of a real,
vivid, and a delightful woman ; and with gratitude
we may leave it so.
The popular estimate, ranking together Richard
Feverel and Diana, no matter what the relative place
of the two in comparison with The Egoist, Beauchamp's
Career, and any of the others, strikes me as a very
correct one ; and it is curious enough that it should
be so, seeing that they were written — or at any rate
were given out to the world — at dates so far apart.
The one was published in 1859 ; the other in 1885.
I may be very wrong, but they appear to me to show
a very similar maturity of genius. Had I been asked,
knowing nothing of the dates, I should have said, in
my ignorance, that they were the products of very
much the same period of the author's life. Is it
possible that after many years, and many books
given to us in the interval, his mind reverted to a
mood of twenty-six years earlier ? It is possible.
Perhaps what is far more probable is that my estimate
of the two, and of the similarity between them, is
far astray from the truth.
As this Diana was one of the greatest of Mr.
Meredith's novels, so it was, I think, the last of the
super-excellent ones. In 1891 came One of our Con
querors, and after that several more, but none, as most

200 SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
of us would judge, to be placed quite on a level with
those already named.
By friends who used to visit George Meredith towards
the end of his life, at his home near Dorking, I was
told that he grew more and more aloof from the
occurrences in the world, and increasingly absorbed
in his own creations. His mind restored them again
and again, speculating as to whether they would or
would not, being such as he had made them, act just
as they did in his writings, in the successive scenes in
which they took their part. Thus he mentally revised
again and again, and it would be of the keenest
interest if we might know the outcome of those
revisions. But that knowledge he has borne with
him to the grave, together with the gratitude of a
growing company of readers to whom he has given
great entertainment and, it is to be presumed, some
clearer insight into the hazy workings of their own
souls.

CHAPTER XVIII
SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
THE fortune of men is very different, and
very carelessly adjusted to their true
merit, in respect to that degree of fame
which each is permitted to enjoy during
his lifetime. To some it is given to reap this parti
cular kind of reward for their achievement as soon as
their fame- worthy deed is performed. From others
the meed of recognition is withheld till they have
passed to another life, in which we do not know how
high its value may appear to them. It is, perhaps,
more than probable that the eminence of one who
was — what shall we say? — here, a Prime Minister,
will then seem somewhat equal to the glory which we,
who are adults, now deem to have been the due meed
of the captain of our private school eleven. No
Prime Minister, by the way, in the estimate of his
Cabinet and his country, was ever a man of such
importance as that small emperor in the eyes of his
subjects and contemporaries.
This brief preamble is suggested by the thought of
the name of Sir Spencer Walpole, for it is a name
which will not mean very much to many who read
it. There is no Civil Servant of his time, it is true,
who can think of it without the idea arising in his
mind of a most charming and kindly personality, an
able official in various capacities, and so forth. But
to the general reading public his is a name but little
known. Yet, as an historian, I do not hesitate to
201

202 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
claim for him that he is in the first rank. How many
have read his history or consider him as a great man ?
There are certain " household words " which fit them out
with all that they deem it necessary to be acquainted
with in the way of writers of history-— Macaulay,
Froude, Lecky, Stubbs, and so on. But who is
Walpole ? they may ask.
Of course no historian asks the question. No
moderately well-informed man, perhaps, asks it.
But I am writing of the many, who are neither
historians nor moderately-informed. And I maintain
that they have hardly, if at all, heard of Spencer
Walpole. So saying, I appear to have imposed on
myself the burden of telling them why it is that they
should have heard of him. I have already said that
he was a great historian. In a little more detail what
he has done to achieve that greatness, is mainly this :
he wrote the History of England from the year of
Waterloo to 1858 ; and supplemented this some
eight years later by his History of Twenty-Five Years ;
these twenty-five being the years that followed the
last date dealt with in the former publication.
Thus he gave the history of sixty-eight years in all.
They are the years in which the events occurred that
are the most immediately important in making our
country what we find it to-day. Further, he wrote
several studies in biography, such as the Life of
Spencer Perceval — who was, if I mistake not, an ances
tor in some sort, collateral or otherwise, of Lord
John Russell — and others, as well as many articles
on political and historical subjects.
That is what he did, but what makes the doing
important is the way in which it was done. His
torians know. They give every credit to the solidity
of the work ; to the width of grasp and the under
standing of the relative proportions of the great
questions discussed and involved ; to the impartial

SIR SPENCER WALPOLE.

20 2]

WALPOLE'S MEMORY 203
and judicious opinions, always stated with a modera
tion and a modesty which are no more than the
natural expression of the writer's own nature ; to the
accuracy of the finance ; and, above all, to the very
scrupulous care with which every fact and figure and
detail have been verified and confirmed. This,
mainly, is what makes the history so valuable, that
its every sentence, its every date and figure, may be
taken in the absolute trust that they are exact. The
labour which he lavished on it all, in order to achieve
this triumphant result of precision, was immense.
I used to see him mainly when it was the Twenty-
Five Years on which he was engaged. I used to ask
him what he had been doing. The answer was always
the same for I should be afraid to say how long :
" Oh, proof-correcting, proof-correcting." Three
several times, as he told me, he went over every fact
and figure that he had quoted, tracing each back to
its farthest discoverable source ; and this, although he
was the last man in the world to need to go again over
ground that he had already traversed, because his
memory was so remarkable that I cannot imagine
him failing to observe any discrepancy between
two readings. It happened to me once to be looking
up in Bradshaw, while in his house, a certain obscure
station. I mentioned it to him. " Oh," he said,
" you will find it on page so and so ! " " How in the
world do you know that ? " I asked. " Oh," he re
plied, " I looked it up for myself only a fortnight ago."
A fortnight ago ! And he had remembered the
number of the page ever since, though he had no
motive whatever for making a mental note of it, and of
course had, in fact, made no such special note. What
struck me as so extraordinary was his surprise at
finding that I deemed it at all surprising in him to
remember it. He seemed to think it a matter of
course that any man, having looked up a station a

204 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
fortnight ago, would still remember the number of the
page on which it was to be found. To me, who
retained a figure of this little importance within my
sieve-like brain for a maximum of, say, five minutes,
the fortnight's retention which he seemed to regard
as almost inevitable appeared almost supernatural.
And I still think that it was a testimony, in itself
trivial enough, to a memory of quite uncommon
quality. Only second, as an element in the value of his
history, to this extraordinary exactness and truth,
is the fortunate balance of his judgment and opinions.
Of moderate views, inclining to the liberal and to the
democratic, is the verdict which would be, and which
actually was, passed on his standpoint towards events.
That means a very sane point of view, and a point
of which the sanity becomes increasingly conspicuous
as the opinion of readers veers in the democratic and
liberal direction. And no one, whether they like the
admission or not, is able to question that general
opinion has moved in that line since the Eighties
and the days of Spencer Walpole 's writing.
He was actually engaged in the compilation of
the first and main part of the history from 1878 to
1 886. It was in the last of these years that the last
volume of that history was published, and it was in
1904 that he gave us the History of Twenty-Five
Years. It is rather amazing, considering the amount of
work which he got through as a Civil Servant, that
he should have found the time for so much production
of a literary kind, and particularly as it was a kind
which demanded so much original research in the
first place and so much attention to detail and correc
tion in the second. He went as Governor to the Isle
of Man in 1882, and later, when there arose need to
find a place for Sir West Ridgeway, he was brought

REAL HUMILITY 205
back to be Secretary to the Post Office. I believe
that he found time for a good deal of writing while
in the Isle of Man. He was far away, indeed, from
his original sources, but he made a good deal of use
of the London Library, of which he was a pillar of
support from the earliest days of its most valuable
institution. He always said that the committee
had treated him very well (he was a leading member
of it himself) in letting him have more books and
keeping them longer than he was strictly entitled to
do. It is merely a wise and justifiable stretching
of that usually inelastic substance, red tape, in favour
of a man thus engaged on literary work of real
importance. What vexed Spencer Walpole most was the
question of his style. I write of him without the
" Sir," which came to him later in the form of a
" K.C.B.," almost forced upon him in 1893. He had
not been dubbed knight during the Eighties. I write
" forced upon him," because that word really represents
the fact. He hated the dubbing. He would not
accept a " C.B.," which was pressed on him earlier,
but consented reluctantly to the " K.C.B." because it
was pointed out that the King could not well make his
subordinates " C.B.," however they had merited it,
while leaving him, their superior, letterless.
He disliked the dubbing simply and solely, I believe,
from modesty. He was, I have always thought, the
most modest man — truly modest, really humble,
with regard to his own powers or performance — that
I ever met. Affected modesty and humility is as
common as blackberries, and the tribe of Uriah
" Heep increases merrily, but the real humility is a very
rare fruit, and I never saw it in such perfection as in
Spencer Walpole. And it was by reason of this
humility that his style was a question of so much
vexation to him. He used to complain bitterly

206 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
almost tearfully. " It is so heavy, so dull ! " he used
to say. I do not find it so. I have no personal
acquaintance whatever with the Muse of History,
but, as I conceive of her, she is a dignified lady,
not to be wooed in any light flirtatious manner, but
with weighty, well-considered words.
It was thus that Spencer Walpole wrote. His
style is dignified, worthy of its theme. It has not
the lightness and the sparkle, it is true, which is
imparted by epigram, but does not that sparkle often
give a rather dazzling look to what is not very deep
or sound below ? The dazzle and the epigram are
all very well for a work which we mean to glance at
and to lay aside after some hours or so of entertain
ment. If we want a history to read, to put up on the
shelf, and then to take down again and again — not
merely, however, a " book of reference, " as it is called,
but a solidly and well-written and well-considered
story of events and reflection on their causes — we
have it, as it seems to me, in these books of his, and
have it as it would not have been, had he succeeded
in lightsome sparkling.
People, in the, wide sense of the reading public,
do not know him to-day ; but people, in that wide
sense, will know. His day will come for popularity,
as it has already arrived at a really better than merely
popular appreciation.
He did, no doubt, achieve much popularity, and
some official dignity, during his life, but the popularity
was personal, and the dignities were conferred for
official work done unsparingly and with ability.
After his retirement from the Post Office he found
himself with larger leisure, and went on the Boards of
several Companies, where his good judgment and his
capacity for figures were very useful. His personal
popularity was great. He was a very sociable man,
with something of that interest in his fellow men and

A FISHERY COMMISSIONER 207
love of gossip of his relative, Horace Walpole. But
he would have been kindlier, even if not quite so
witty in comment, than that immortal diarist and
letter writer. Nor do I think that he would have
perpetrated the Gothic of Strawberry Hill. There
was no trouble that he would not take to serve a friend,
and I believe that he would have done as much for an
enemy. The only difficulty in the latter case being
that he would probably have been quite at a loss
where to find one. A more unselfish man could not be.
Early in his career he had been associated as one
of the Fishery Commissioners with Frank Buckland,
and used to tell wonderful stories about the queer
aquatic things that would tumble out of Frank
Buckland 's coat pockets when they went to stay as
fellow guests at a house where a friend of one or the
other was entertaining them in the course of their
peregrinations inspecting rivers and fisheries. The
flavour of Frank Buckland 's coat in consequence came
to be such that his association with things fishy could
be perceived at a considerable distance. In spite
of this association, Spencer Walpole. was not keenly
interested in any branch of natural history. If a
mind could be said to have but a small range which
took in the whole of English history, and all foreign
history that had any connection with it, as its
province, it would be then true to say of him that his
intellect worked within a limited circle, for nothing
outside this tolerably large circumference made any
strong appeal to him. Probably it was, in part, on
account of that limit that it was such a thoroughly
effective mind within its range.
His death came with alarming suddenness in 1907,
when he was still engrossed in his literary work and
his Company directing, and when he still appeared to
have vigour beyond his age and to spare for many
years to come. He had the strong, stout figure, with

208 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
moderate height and broad chest development)
which usually promises a long life. To the last he
kept the ruddy colour of a young man and a look of
youth in his singularly blue and kindly eyes. The
greyish hair and beard were the only signs of age.

ANDREW LANG
I hardly know why I thus couple up Andrew Lang
with Spencer Walpole, unless it be that both were
historians — of a sort. But it was of a widely different
sort, and they would not have jogged in double
harness together. Walpole's rank and mode as an
historian I have just discussed. Andrew Lang was
historian by accident rather — the accident that some
of the people who caught his quick fancy and incited
him to write about them were engaged in great his
torical drama — Mary Queen of Scots most notably,
also Pickle the Spy, and others. Andrew Lang was a
number of things intellectually, for the versality and
range of his mind were extraordinary, but of all things
that which he was not was an historian at all of the
type of Spencer Walpole. He did not care a bit about
the measures or the political games in which the people
that interested him were taking in hand, or cared only
in so far as they were the setting, the scenery, for his
actors. It was the actors themselves and their doings
that appealed to him. And yet here again we have
to make a qualification : he was interested in the
activities of these persons, in the scrapes into which
they fell and in the puzzles, as in a detective story,
which they presented ; but he was not really very
interested in their characters and their motives.
As he himself confessed to me once, " I can do nothing
with human nature." He meant, as a writer of the
novel. He was quite right in his estimate of himself.

ANDREW LANG.

208]

LANG AS HISTORIAN 209
Few people probably are aware that he ever tried his
hand at a novel ; but he did, and very bad it was.
I think it was called The Brand of Cain, or something
of that kind, and I well remember his amazement
to discover that I had read it. It was not altogether
gratified amazement either. He was actually sorry
that any one for whose opinion he cared even the least
bit should have read it, so convinced was he of its
badness. Of course it was only because it had his
name to it that it ever got itself published.
To be sure, he wrote The Disentanglers, an ingenious
idea, ingeniously worked ; but it is hardly to be called a
novel, or a study in humanity. He collaborated with
Rider Haggard, too, in The World's Desire, but his
personal share is not obvious ; and, after all, its theme
is a type only, and perhaps not a very probable type.
And all this disability to " make anything " of human
nature arose, in all likelihood, from the fact that
motives and character did not present problems of
real interest to him. He did not go probing down
deeply into the springs of conduct ; he found much
more excitement in the material and the obvious.
It is singular that it should be so, with his very acute
intellect, but so it was.
It appears to me that I am, so far, saying everything
that is negative about Lang, recording everything that
he was not. It is a way, like another, of sketching a
portrait, to begin with determining the lines to be left
out, and having thus begun, I may continue. He
was, then, as unlike as possible to Spencer Walpole,
because he had not the real historian's bent of mind,
he had not the weighing, judicial sense. With all
my deep admiration for Andrew Lang — and let me
say at once that I did admire and love him greatly —
he was the last man to whom I would go for a judicious
opinion on men, women, or affairs. He lived in a
curious detachment, although he touched at so many
14

210 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
points the various interests of very different men.
His was, in truth, one of the most remarkable
personalities and intellects that we shall find in all
this portrait gallery. He touched at so many points,
and yet he drove in deeply at none of them ; he was
really aloof all the while ; and he made this merely
surface contact in spite of possessing an intellect most
penetrating and incisive. So, in his historical studies,
if we call them so, though we should be more right
in saying " studies of historical persons," he picked
the actors up, let his graceful fancy, his fine intellect,
and his delightful style play about with them for
a time, and then dropped them back again into the
welter of history for the true historian to deal with
them. I have heard the term " scrappy " applied
to his methods, and it was not misapplied. He him
self confessed to habits of carelessness and inaccuracy
in detail. I think that he exaggerated this inaccuracy :
he was really far more conscientious as a writer than
he gave himself the credit of being ; but it is certainly
impossible to think of Andrew Lang going over his
proofs three times, and verifying and re-verifying
his figures and citations, as Spencer Walpole did,
He wrote as easily as Walpole wrote laboriously.
He was indeed the quickest writer that I have ever
known. I have heard him say : "Is it humanly
speaking possible to write an article before dinner ? "
— taking out his watch — " Twenty minutes before
we need go and dress ! Yes, I think it just is." And
off he would go — I think it was for the Daily News
that hewas writing at this time occasional articles about
all things in general, and a few more — and scribble
down the article, and as a rule these lightning articles
of his were the best : these forked-lightning articles,
perhaps we should say, for all his writing had the
speed of merely common electricity. The reading
of them did not go quite so fast. For days I have

A BRILLIANT INTELLECT 211
kept a letter of Andrew Lang's by me, wondering at
its meaning, making intelligent guesses from time to
time, and usually, at each new look, discovering the
significance of some new hieroglyphic, until all was
unravelled. But it was a very tangled skein, and my
pity for his compositors was sore.
In its own way, Andrew Lang's intellect was the
most brilliant and the most delightful that I have had
the luck to encounter. I say that deliberately and
with no hesitation. His fancy was so graceful, his
taste so perfect. The world in which his spirit really
lived was a kind of fairy-land. He came down to
this terrestrial business only now and then, always
with a spectator's interest in it rather than an actor's.
There was a pathetic side to this. He had a great
leaning to the athletic and to the primitive ; the
life of the savage and of the gipsy appealed to him.
I am not sure but that he had some strain of gipsy
blood in him. His singularly handsome dark face and
large dreaming eyes gave suggestion of it, and gipsies,
even of royal race, moved a good deal among the
Border Scottish families to which the Langs were
akin. He was thus drawn by his disposition ; and
yet his health was always delicate, so that the life
even of the ordinary athletic man of civilisation was
forbidden him. He had to be very careful in his diet ;
he could not travel very long distances in a day, I
think because the rattle and jolt of a long train
journey were too much for his head. It was all a very
delicately balanced organisation, of the very finest
constituents. I believe he had once been a fair
bowler, with a slingy, fast action : never more than
moderately good, I imagine, and less effective than
his brother T. W., who was in the Oxford Eleven as
a medium-paced bowler. But with this exception
I can think of no form of athletics in which he took
part.

2 1 2 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
And yet there was no form that did not interest
him. He wrote delightfully of golf, of cricket, of
fishing — he was something of a trout-fisher, by the
way, though very rarely catching a trout — especially
he wrote well of golf, so far as a man can write well
of a game which he cannot play at all. Even a stroke
a hole handicap would have complimented him too
highly. But it was always the writing of an artist,
though his art was not golf, but literature. He loved
Sagas, and all deeds of derring-do. He loved the
classics, such as Homer, because they tell stories of
heroes, and he loved them even better than the Sagas,
because they are heroic stories told with art, while
the Sagas are absolutely artless. He would have been
perfectly at home had he lived in ancient Greece, or
in the Iceland of the Vikings, or in the Provence of
the Troubadours — only, he would not have lived, for
the climatic and sanitary conditions would have been
his immediate death. But in any one of these
environments he would have been more at home than
in modern England, and especially in modern London.
" Why people live in London," he wrote to me once,
" I wonder ; and my wonder ever grows." Yet
he lived there, and in Marloes Road, Kensington—
not one of the most romantic streets. " Where is
Marloes Road ? " I heard some one ask him, who
wished to call on him. " You go along the Cromwell
Road till you drop," said Andrew Lang. " It's
there ! "
So there he lived and wrote and dreamed ; and it
was in his dreams — by which I mean waking dreams,
of course — that he was happy. He lived in Kensing
ton, and I think that if one had asked him what life
he would like best to have lived or be living — he might
have said that he wished to be going with Herodotus,
the old father of history, on that pilgrimage to Egypt,
about which he tells us in his fourth book :

MARLOES ROAD 213
He left the land of youth, he left the young,
The smiling Gods of Greece ; he passed the isle
Where Jason loitered and where Sappho sung ;
He sought the secret-founted wave of Nile,
Of that old world, half dead a weary while ;
Heard the Priests murmur in their mystic tongue,
And through the fanes went voyaging, among
Dark tribes that worshipped Cat and Crocodile.
He learned the tales of death Divine and birth,
Strange loves of hawk and serpent, Sky and Earth,
The marriage and the slaying of the Sun ;
The shrines of ghosts and beasts he wandered through,
And mocked not of their godhead, for he knew
Behind all creeds the Spirit that is One.
That is how Lang himself writes of this bewitching
adventure in the sonnet which he prefaces to a reprint
of an old translation of that fourth book. The
sonnet gives us a good deal of the real Lang and of his
psychical cravings. He would go with the traveller
for the very adventure's sake, for the brine and the
tossing of the sea, for the peril by water and by land.
And he would go to satisfy his yearning intellect with
knowledge. He would hear stories. He would learn
folk-lore, and that was of deep interest to him.
Finally he would be living in a fairy-land, as remote
from Marloes Road as may be.
He made up, in a measure, for Marloes Road, by
going to St. Andrews in the winter — in the winter
of all seasons for the East Neuk of Fife. Yet it had
its delights, I know, because he used to let me come
and stay with him there. The house that he took
stood right on the cliff, with the splendid old ruin of
the Castle on its eastern side, and northward the Firth
of Tay, and Forfarshire opposite. That was a fitter
habitation for a man who was dreaming of going
a- Viking. He went from London, but he never went
for a holiday. A holiday would be impossible for
a man whose imagination worked so perpetually,

214 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
and whose artistic impulse drove him to constant
expression in words. He must write, and he did write,
whether at St. Andrews or elsewhere. He also had
the air of abundant leisure ; he was always ready to
talk and to idle : he took his work and his art with so
little apparent seriousness that he actually never had
a study, apart, to write in, either in London or any
where else. He always seemed to regard himself
rather in the light of an amateur, whose production
was worth very little, so that it did not matter a jot
to the world whether it was produced or not. He
said to me once : " People ask me why I do not write
some big book. Why should I write a big book ?
I have no particular message for the world."
Perhaps he had not, unless it be the common
message of all artists, to make the world realise the
beauty of the world as it never would do without the
artist and his revelations. And yet it always made
me angry to hear people talking of Andrew Lang as if
he were a literary trifler, a minor poet, a writer of
Ballads in Blue China, and no more. He was all this,
but he was a great deal more besides. People who
judged him thus had forgotten, or did not know, those
serious books of his on ancient religious ceremony and
so on : Custom and Myth, and Myth, Ritual, and Re
ligion. They did not know, or did not think of, his
share with Butcher and Leaf and Myers in the transla
tions of the Odyssey and the Iliad. They did not
remember his brilliant record at Oxford, nor recognise
the range of his learning, stored and kept brightly
ready for use by a very retentive memory. He knew
old French literature, both prose and verse, better
than any other man I ever met, though of course he
made no speciality of it, nor of any other one subject
of study. The truth is that he was so very quick
of apprehension that he could grasp a subject with
about half the attention that a common mind had

HIS REAL RESPECT FOR HIS WORK 215
to apply to achieve anything like the same mastery.
But he worked far harder than people thought, and
was far more conscientious than they supposed. For
instance, I happen to know that he toiled for weeks
and months over a projected history of the Jewish
tribes. He did not like the point of view of Renan
in his Histoire des Peuples d' Israel, although he had an
unbounded admiration for it as a work of art and
storehouse of knowledge. I had left him keenly
engaged in this. A short while after I met him again
and asked : " Well, how are the children of Israel ?
Are they out of the desert yet ? " He had been
humorously bemoaning the apparently quite unneces
sary length of their sojourn in those inhospitable
arenas. " Oh," he said lightly, " I have given it up,
given up all idea of it ; I have torn up what I had
written. I have come to the conclusion that no man
ought to write about it who does not know Hebrew."
He spoke thus lightly, but it was no light sacrifice
that he had made. He had sacrificed months of toil,
and destroyed MS. that any publisher would cer
tainly have given good money for, even in its frag
mentary style. But money, and what most men
regard as the good things of this life, interested him
hardly at all. Folk-lore, crystal gazing, psychical
research, and old story of all kinds were the things
of the spirit which really seemed to him to matter.
A certain material comfort he was obliged to have,
if he was to live, by reason of his delicacy of constitu
tion, and the devoted love of Mrs. Lang assured him
these, without any personal attention of his own.
She shared, too, in all his literary interests, and
published several books, of which Dissolving Views
probably won most fame.
I do not suppose that it is possible for any one to
have the least knowledge of Lang and of his work
without realising the brilliance of his intellect. What

216 SPENCER WALPOLE AND ANDREW LANG
I do not think has been nearly enough recognised
is the warmth and kindliness of his heart. It is to be
admitted of him that he was at times impatient and
even petulant. Much of this, doubtless, may be
put down to the score of his always rather indifferent
health. It is true, however, that he habitually
suffered fools badly, very badly ; and also that fools
were apt to suffer badly from the caustic wit which ran
so readily from his pen. But there are scores of
writers alive and at work to-day who would bear
witness to the help which his kindly encouragement
gave them at a time when their inexperience was in
much need of such aid ; and he was as liberal of his
money as of his counsel. The contributors to his
Red, Blue, and all sorts of coloured Fairy Books were
rewarded with a generosity which left very little
balance for the editor, and the assistants of his
musings under "The Sign of the Ship " in Longman's
Magazine often ate up all the guineas that the pub
lishers gave him for this monthly " feature."
His interests ranged widely, but two of the sides
of life which are the main concern of very many men,
politics and finance, appealed to him not at all, and
when either of these came on the tapis he made not
the slightest effort, not even so much as mere courtesy
might demand, to conceal his boredom. In some
ways he was more like a supernaturally brilliant child
than a grown man — possibly a slightly spoilt child.
It was a child's world in which his spirit moved, and
moved with a whimsical fancy quite delightful.
Some of his obiter dicta are worth quoting : " This
book is good, though powerful," was the opening
sentence of one of his reviews of a novel in the
Saturday. Of another he wrote : "A touch of the
supernatural is added by the hero finding the book he
wants in the London Library." This was in the early
days of that admirable and now very well-equipped

"IT BEGAN TO THUNDER" 217
institution ; and we may well believe that Lang, in
his quest for old and little-known books on old French
literature and the like, may have been a sore thorn
in the side of the librarian and his ever attentive staff.
He was appointed Gibbon Lecturer in Natural
Theology at St. Andrews. " What line did he take ?, "
I asked Rider Haggard, who had been at the opening
lecture. " He commenced," Haggard answered,
" with ' Once it began to thunder ; and men began
to wonder.' " It was a characteristic start for Andrew
Lang to make, and perhaps the large and vague
topic could not be broached much more auspiciously.
I had heard nothing of his last illness until its fatal
end, and the news was very grievous. It seemed as
if an element of lightness went with him from the
world. But he had little reserve of strength to fight
any serious attack, and, for all his gaiety and wit, he
was by nature disposed to melancholy. I should
imagine that his vitality was always rather below
the normal. Many others have made a larger figure
in the world, but there have been few in our generation
of such an interesting and attractive personality.

CHAPTER XIX
WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
MR. WATTS was the oldest of the three great
painters, Watts, Millais, and Burne-Jones,
who were producing glorious works for
our delight in the Eighties. I am not
forgetting that this period saw the rising genius
of Mr. Sargent. His picture, of or about this time,
which I seem to remember best is Mrs. (now Lady)
Agnew — a beautiful portrait of a beautiful woman.
But Sargent happily is painting still, and should have
many years of work before him. The other three
are gone.
Watts 's production may be split up not so much
into periods as into phases. He had the phase in
which he did symbolism ; another phase in which
portraiture attracted him, yet another in which his
zeal was all for the presentment of virile force. Per
haps we might better call them moods, than phases.
But they cannot strictly be called periods, because
there was no regular succession about them. The
one mood or the other might possess him for a while,
and then all his production would be of works that
were the expression of that mood. And then another
mood would come and another kind of production,
and the former, now laid aside, would be returned
to later.
In the Eighties, when I used to see him, he was
greatly occupied with the physical force idea. Thus
he was working — when indeed, for months and years,
218

G. F. WATTS IN HIS STUDIO.

218]

DIFFERENT PHASES 219
was he not now and again so working ? — at that great
equestrian figure of which we see the replica in
Kensington Gardens. He called it " Physical
Energy," and the expression of energy is abundant
both in horse and man. I like to think that the ori
ginal is far away on the Matoppo Hills, watching the
grave of Cecil Rhodes, the Empire-maker. Then he
had also in his studio at the time the big canvas of
the two huge dray-horses and the only little less huge
drayman, looking like an advertisement to the blood-
making qualities of beer. There is no keen energy
manifest in either horse or man here : it is rather the
massiveness of force in repose that they exhibit.
They are moving nothing, not even themselves, for
the moment, but you are obliged to feel that battering
rams could hardly move them. It was perhaps a
curious form for Watts 's genius to take, because there
was none of this great robustness about him, per
sonally. One could suppose it much more naturally
the expression of Millais' nature, who, however,
never did anything of exactly this kind, so far as I
know. Of course this picture and this statue in
which physical force were so typified were symbolical,
but in rather a different way from those frankly
romantic and allegorical figures, the " Love and Life,"
the " Love and Death," "The Minotaur," and so on.
It is especially this class of picture with which the
name of Mr. Watts is associated in the minds of
most people. He had faith that they carried a moral
message with them. If we think of each, we can see
easily what the message is that he means it to carry,
but it is doubtful whether nine out of ten of those
who look at them ever think of it. I have a suspicion
that although he flattered himself with the opinion
that he was painting them primarily for the sake of
the message, it was really the joy of colour and form
that inspired him. He was an immense admirer of

220 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
the Venetians, and it is their rich colours that he aims
at. He was very strong and correct in his suggestion
of the form beneath the skin. His knowledge of
anatomy was perfect ; and you can always " feel,"
so to say, where the bone lies and where the chief
muscle is attached under his flesh surfaces ; but his
real joy was in the colour. He could take delight in
it as expressed by other modern artists, as well as
by himself, for he was unstintedly generous in his
praise, even extravagant maybe.
" Have you seen the exhibition of Lady Waterford's
pictures ? " he asked me one day. It was shortly after
the death, if I remember right, of that gifted lady.
I said " No," and further confessed, to my shame,
that I knew nothing of her. " But you must," he
said. " It is imperative. You must not miss it.
It is at Lord Brownlow's house in Carlton House
Terrace. She is the greatest colorist we have had
since the days of the great Italians, I have seen
nothing like it. They say that she cannot draw.
I don't care for that. She draws quite well enough."
Of course I went, and of course I fervently admired.
Equally, of course, it is not for me to state my private
judgment beside that of Mr. Watts. That Lady
Waterford was a very great colorist, no one will doubt.
That she drew " quite well enough " is open to rather
more question. But I quote the opinion of Watts
by way of example of the warmth of appreciation
which would carry him now and then to an extreme
that some will perhaps call not quite balanced.
In any case, this contented criticism of Lady Water-
ford's drawing is rather striking, and very typical,
from one whose own drawing was so very perfect and
whose conscience, in connection with his drawing, was
never at ease unless that perfection was reached.
And then there was his phase, or mood, of por
traiture. If we were able to collect and range to-

"THE SIGNOR" 221
gether a gallery of his men's heads, that in itself
would show a noble achievement for any painter.
An excellent example is the head of Lord Lawrence
in the National Gallery. With women he was not
quite successful ; but then, what painter is ! One of
his best was of Mrs. Coltman Rogers, whose beautiful
and refined face greatly attracted him. The shoulders
wear a cloak of a blue that makes a wonderful
harmony with the corn-hued hair. But this is a
story of a day later than the Eighties.
Mr. Watts had a very delightful gentleness, courtesy,
and dignity of manner. It was the manner of a man
who lived entirely out of the world, engrossed in his
art. He was offered a baronetcy, but declined it ;
and one cannot conceive a motive for him to accept.
He had no children, and could not care for it per
sonally, since it certainly could not give him added
honour. There were a few ladies by whom he was devoutly
worshipped. They called him " The Signor," or
" The Master." It is a situation which very few
men are able to support without appearing slightly
ridiculous ; but Mr. Watts accepted it without loss
of dignity. I think that he found it agreeable,
though he did not value it at all above its worth.
Still he appeared to accept it seriously : possibly he
had not a very keen sense of humour. The wor
shipping ladies were a little ridiculous at times,
inevitably ; but I do not think that Mr. Watts ever
was. " Posterity is a funny fellow," as some one has
sapiently said. One never knows just what its
verdict is going to be. But the production by which
posterity is likely to judge Watts, and by which it
will surely rank him with the immortals, is his por
traits, that gallery of men's heads. There were those,
and good judges of art, too, among them,, who could

222 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
not tolerate his allegories, which made him popular.
I suppose it must have been a little later than the
Eighties, probably in the following decade, that
I was going through the Tate Gallery with Sir John
Day, the judge. Sir John was a great judge, not only
of law but also of art, and a considerable buyer of
pictures. He had, especially, a very fine collection
of the Barbizon School, which he had made long before
there was any vogue for that style. Mr. Obach,
from whom the greater part of the collection had been
bought, told me some twenty years ago that Sir
John's collection must even then be worth quite
double what he had given for it. Sir John, however,
took no financial interest in his acquisition. He was
a lover of beauty for its own sake, and had either
published, or had printed and privately circulated,
a small book named The Idea of Beauty. Thus he had
every right to speak with some authority on a matter
of art, especially the painter's art. And when we
came on these grand allegories of Watts, with their
Venetian richness of colours, what he did was to lift
up his hands with an expression of comic horror on
his always most humorous face, and exclaim, " Well,
well ! Well, well ! If that's what painting's meant
for ! " He became almost inarticulate in his dismay
at the splendid canvases.
To me, at that time in rather a fervent state of
Watts-worship, the comment from a man whose
opinion in art I was obliged to reverence piously, was
rather shocking. I tried to say a word or two of
protest, and in defence of these glowing splendours.
He would listen to none of it. He would not take a
second look at the pictures. He hurried past them, as
though the sight of them pained his eyes, as indeed it
did. Mr. Watts, however, can afford to be judged by
other work than this, and his fame is secure. A few
curious by-products of his art are to be found in the

SIR JOHN MILLAIS 223
cricket pavilion at Lord's. They are curious, because,
so far as I know, he never cared greatly for cricket.
But he did greatly care, as we have seen, for virile
energy, and thus it interested him to draw sketches
of the cricketer in the poses of the different strokes
with the bat. There is much vigour of action about
them, and every one is a perfect representation of
the portrayed stroke as it should be played.
Mr. Watts worked much alone. He was not of a
school, unless his continuance of the Venetian colour
tradition assigns him to that noble heritage, nor was
he at all obviously the founder of a school. There
was no eminent originality in his methods. But in
all his phases he was, beyond all question, a very noble
painter, to be ranked among our greatest.
MILLAIS
Was there ever a man who looked less like an artist
than Sir John Millais ? I cannot think it. Had one
met him in the street, not knowing him, and been
told to guess at his profession, one would have said,
" Country gentleman ; fox-hunter ; good man of
business in county affairs."
That was his look — big, bluff, very intelligent, and
most remarkably handsome. It was impossible to
pass him without a second glance. His manner was
to match with his look, genial and hearty ; again
the manner of a good-hearted English squire. But
artist — no ; anything but !
I am not sure but what his most intimate disposition
accorded with his look and manner rather than with
his profession as artist. He loved the country, and he
loved sport — the sport of fishing best of all. At one
time he rented Murthly from Mr. Walter Fotheringham.
It was there that he painted his "Murthly Moss,"
and one or two other very beautiful pictures. But he

224 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
took it for the sport rather than for the picturesque.
It is on the Tay, and good salmon fishing goes with it.
I fished with some of his gillies later, and they used
to tell me wonderful stories of Sir John's keenness,
perhaps to stimulate my own. It did not need much
stimulus, when a possible salmon was in question,
but I cannot claim that it was equal to Sir John
Millais'. I would fish when there was the barest
conceivable chance of a salmon ; but he would fish
when there was absolutely none at all. When the
water was perfectly gin-clear, they told me, he would
come down, day after day, under a burning sun, and
flog it steadily down with his fly just as eagerly as if
a fish might be expected to rush at it on every cast.
Of course it is not given to one man to know the
intimate heart of another : it may be that he thus
flogged and flogged to get rid of superfluous energy,
or it may be that his work, his painting, had such firm
hold on his thoughts that he resorted to this means
of shaking it off a little and getting quit of it for a
while. But I do not think so. I do not think that
he was a painter, an artist, a poet, of such a nature
and conviction that his art would fasten on him with
this strange grip. In one sense that was the pity of
it, perhaps — that his art was not all in all, and his
whole life and all that mattered in it, to him as it was
to his great contemporaries Watts and Burne-Jones.
He was a stronger man, physically, than either of
these ; more virile of aspect ; looking as if he had more
blood in his veins. Thus he was perhaps able to throw
off a load of work and of thought better than they.
He would not need the relaxation for the same reason
that they might need it, though I do not know that
either of them was a fisherman or lover of sport in
any form. I believe that he fished for the pure love
of fishing, and cast when there was not the faintest
chance, humanly speaking, of a salmon, in the dim

(By Charles R. Leslie, R.A.)
SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, R.A.

224]

MILLAIS' PORTRAITURE 225
hope that the supernatural might happen, that a
miracle might be vouchsafed, and that a salmon,
contrary to all the laws of nature and of its kind,
might even in these impossible circumstances attach
itself to the far end of his line.
It is hard to tell, as I say, what the temperamental
gifts of Millais were for the art of which he was so
great a master, but that is the only question about
his gift which can be in any conceivable doubt. In
all other ways, at all events, he was opulently gifted —
gifted, as I am disposed to think, beyond either of the
others I have named with him. His colour was so
fine and so true, he could carry it so far at both ends of
the scale ; his drawing was so good and facile, his
range was so wide. He could do portrait or landscape
or what you will. Anything that man has done with
brush and colour seemed as if it came perfectly easily
to his hand. He deals with it all like one to whom it
was no effort. That is the impression that it gives,
and it is an impression that all evidence points to as
correct. Behind it all there is still the hint of pity, still the
feeling that with such transcendent gifts of hand and
eye and mind he might have done more, very much
though he did.
It does not do to be ungrateful. He has given us
glorious pictures. Just because of his landscapes and
his " subject " pictures, or drama-pictures, or what
ever they should be called, such as his " Huguenots "
or " The Black Brunswicker," people are rather apt to
forget how much he did in portrait. He painted Mr.
Gladstone three several times, once right in the middle
of the Eighties, in 1885, and once just before that
period, in 1879; and again just after it, in 1 890. And
he did portraits of Lord Salisbury and Lord Beacons-
field about the same time. For his " subject "
pictures he often took one or other of his own
IS

226 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
daughters, especially Miss Effie Millais, afterwards
Mrs. James, a very beautiful woman, for his models.
The effective portraiture of women's faces did not
seem to present the difficulty to him that it did to
many artists who have been well able to cope with
the more rugged and marked male face. He dealt
with all ages and both sexes with equal apparent ease
and success. Those little boys blowing " Bubbles," and
extensively used by Messrs. Pears to advertise their
soap, were his grandsons, and the sons of that Mrs.
James who was born Miss Effie Millais. He was a
charming painter of children. I tried once to get him
to paint a little girl friend of mine, now the wife of a
general, with boys at Eton, telling him that she was
the most lovely child that had ever been seen. " My
dear fellow," he said, " I am pestered morning, noon,
and night by people coming and telling me that they
have found the most beautiful child that ever was
seen, and asking me to paint her."
So he would not ; but he was wrong, for I am still
sure that she was the most beautiful child that ever
was — in spite of all those others. I quite admit the
probability that each of the parents of those others
thinks quite the same in regard to theirs. But this
was no relative of mine ; I had at least that advantage
for impartial judgment.
If Millais himself had little look of an artist, his
studio in Kensington Palace Gardens had even less
likeness to the typical atelier. He built the house
himself. It was very commodious and comfortable,
and, I suppose, of the style that the house-agent would
describe as " sumptuous." The studio was like a
very nice large room in a very nice large house, with
nothing very suggestive of art about it, except the
big easel and the chair on rails so that he could run
it back easily away from the canvas when he wanted
to have a real look at it, and forward again to bring

A PRE-RAPHAELITE 227
him within brush-range. The house was finished, and
he went into occupation of it, in 1879, so he was there
all through the Eighties. And all the Eighties
through he also had Murthly. It is in Perthshire,
and Lady Millais was a Miss Gray of Perth, living in
a house on the north side of the river with a beautiful
and very peaceful garden, which is the original scene
of one of his best-known pictures, " The Vale of Rest."
He was made Sir John, and a baronet, in 1885.
We are rather apt to forget, under the impression
of his later work, that he not only started as a Pre-
Raphaelite, but that he even started Pre-Raphaelitism
itself. It is, of course, a little difficult to say with
precision who were the real immediate parents of a
movement of this kind, or the exact moment at which
it had its first being. It does not spring on the world
at any single instant fully grown and armed like the
unfortunate goddess who never had a childhood but
jumped straight out of Jove's head. Generally,
however, the initiative of the brotherhood is ascribed
to Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti. Millais'
talent developed very early, and, born in 1829, he
was already originating, with those others, these new
ideals in art in 1846. Some of his pictures of that
period are vivid beyond belief, until looking at them
compels belief. His " Autumn Leaves " is a gorgeous
riot of colour. Personally I care far less for his
"Ophelia," though probably I am quite wrong, because
so many good judges admire it immensely. But I
cannot believe that Hamlet would have thought it did
Ophelia any kind of justice> or that the story would
have been as it is if Ophelia had been as Millais shows
her. The statement of the Pre-Raphaelite aim, to
which he, in common with Hunt and Rossetti, com
mitted himself, runs thus, and simple enough : " To
present on canvas what they saw in Nature."
Well, yes — and Millais, looking at "Autumn Leaves,"

228 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
painted each leaf just as he saw it, and splendid the
result is, but it is not the result that a man's eye
receives from looking at a heap of autumn leaves, of
which his painting purports to be a picture. It
is the sum of the result which the eye receives from
looking at each leaf severally — and that is quite a
different result.
This, however, is not the place, nor has the writer
the least ability, to discuss the fundamentals of Pre-
Raphaelitism, which in effect amounts to the dis
cussion of the principles of the whole art of the
painter. Millais himself did not long remain faithful to the
principles which he had thus stated, nor to the
fellowship which he had helped to found. After
i860 he was no longer to be numbered among the
brotherhood. He died while he was still of an age to
give us many more pictures, in the fullness of his
power. BURNE-JONES
We might suppose it impossible to conceive a man
more whole-souled and single in his devotion to art
and to the cult of beauty than Watts, and yet I
believe that the Eighties had such a man to show us
in Burne-Jones. Seldom as the former permitted
himself a side-glance down the ways that are fre
quented by ordinary men, the latter probably allowed
himself that distraction even less often. Then, too,
we see phases, or moods, in Mr. Watts' work : the
moods of allegory, of portraiture, and of the admiration
of the glory of great strength. Burne-Jones, save
for a few pencil drawings of faces that interested him,
had no mood other than that which inspired his
presentment of beautiful form and line and colour,
and beautiful story. Further, he never was afflicted,
so far as I am aware, in any one of his sets of paintings

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(From a photograph by Holyer.) SIR E. BURNE-JONES.

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SIR E. BURNE-JONES 229
with the burden of a definite moral purpose ; which
Watts had to carry at times, not to the furtherance,
as some thought, of his best effort in art. Much
incidental morality he gave us, no doubt, but it was
by the way ; it was not part of the essential aim.
On a day to be numbered with the highest note of
red, among days of good fortune and happy coin
cidence, there came up to Exeter College, Oxford,
two Freshmen, of whom one was named William
Morris and the other Edward Burne-Jones. I do
not think that either had any previous knowledge of
the other ; but it seems that they were not long in
finding each other out and in discovering that there
was in each of them a spirit disposed to the worship
and pursuit of beauty, as it is not likely that they
would find it in any other undergraduate. It is a
great bit of luck that there should have been this
coincidence to draw them together. It is hardly to
be supposed that Morris, such a man as he was, would
have been any other, or much other, than the Morris
as we know him, even had Burne-Jones not happened ;
but it is equally difficult to think that Burne-Jones
would have been just what he was, or would have
given us that series of romantic pictures, to be a joy
for ever, had Morris not happened — and happened
just when he did, so that their common " freshness "
brought them into close intimacy in the strange
Philistine company. The binding of the bonds of
the friendship thus commenced has been told to
perfection by Mr. Mackail and others, and is a story
long precedent to the Eighties. The name of Burne-
Jones was already known, already " made," as we
say, by this decade ; but it could not fairly be said
to be " made " until some very few years before.
There were all the trials and the struggles of these
lean yet delightful (as they surely must have been)
years, under the masterful segis of "Red Lion Mary,"

230 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
the "cook-general," as I suppose she should be called,
of that house in the Square of the Red Lion, which
some of the brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelites
shared. We must call Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite — I sup
pose he would so have called himself — for he was
brought up with them ; they were his friends ; but
do we see very much of the special influence of that
school in his work? I, at least, cannot. And it is
curious that, if he professed himself of a brotherhood
whose aim in art was defined as being " to present on
canvas what they saw in Nature," he should have
given us a full gallery of beautiful things that most
certainly he never did see in Nature. Almost of open
avowal, he gave us " the light that never was on land
or sea " ; went in quest of it, and determined that it
was the ultimate principle of art to find it and present
it, in order to gladden and lift the hearts of those who
had not the genius to seek and find it for themselves.
I do not know how he would have defined his art :
I suspect that he had a wholesome hatred of defini
tions. His wish, I believe, would have been to live
emotionally rather than intellectually. I remember,
on one of the few occasions that I had the privilege to
meet him, mentioning an article that I had lately been
reading in Mind. Upon which he asked, with a most
wearied and pathetic emphasis on the title, " Is there
a paper called Mind? " As much as to say, what a
fearful thing that a whole journal should be so given
over to the things of the intellect as even to dub itself
with such a name !
Nevertheless, Burne-Jones was the possessor of
a delightfully humorous and fanciful mind of his own.
He was the best of company, in that particular and
whimsical way. He was not the company for all men,
for he had very few dealings with the Philistines, and
no sympathy at all with them. For the most part

"THE BRIAR ROSE" 231
he was happier in the society of women than of men.
But the men whom he did like were real friends, and
most of all that friend whom he made on his first day
of going to Exeter, at Oxford, Morris. I believe that
Morris came every Sunday to Burne-Jones or he to
Morris when both were in London, all through their
lives, and they would talk art all the morning through.
It does not seem as if either went much to church,
except to paint a window. Yet both, I imagine, were
religious men.
I think it was in 1877 that the Grosvenor Gallery
was opened, and from that opening we may date the
popular recognition of Burne-Jones as a painter of
individual genius and a depictor of scenes and figures
of uncommon beauty. In the first year of the Eighties
he was exhibiting the " Briar Rose " series and the
"Perseus." He was born in 1837, so he was not
young when the full measure of success came to him ;
that is to say, not young as measured by the age
at which many artists have commanded fame.
It is hardly necessary to name any others of his
works, for he was not a painter of many modes, and
these are typical of that mode in which he worked so
perfectly. But he had many applications of this
mode, sometimes under the direct influence of Morris,
as in the window work and in his illustrations for the
Chaucer and other classics that Morris printed at the
Kelmscott Press. There is a lovely piano, which he
painted for Mrs. (now Lady) Horner. That was
exhibited, so the world has seen it, and fortunately it
escaped being devoured by the fire which disastrously
burnt down Sir John Horner's beautiful house — Mells,
where the piano used to be.
There is no painter more easy to appraise. I do
not mean to say that it is easy to assign him his
precise rank in the immortal hierarchy of great
painters. Far be such presumption from me ! But

232 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
it is not so difficult as with many others to see where
his greatness lies, and where his weakness. Both the
many qualities and the one defect are alike obvious.
I do not speak of the technique, as of his use of water-
colour, very dry, for the sake of the texture, used in
conjunction with oil-colour — to the despair of some
of the cleaners of his canvases, who have dealt
with them as if they were wholly done in oil-colour.
That cleansing has been to the undoing of the picture,
too. All this is a mystery into which I am not suffi
ciently initiated to pass judgment on it, further than
to say that as there are
A hundred thousand ways of making tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right
— I quote from an execrable memory — so it does not
seem to matter, granted you achieve your effect,
what your technique, what your mode of laying on
the colour, and what the medium for its mixture.
And Burne-Jones' technique achieved its end to a
marvel. So we need say no more about it.
And that end which it achieved was this : he
presented us with a very large series of large canvases
telling us tales from the classic epics, from mediaeval
legend, or from Scandinavian Saga. Whenever or
wherever a beautiful story had been told Burne-Jones
would illustrate it beautifully. He would illustrate
it with the finest possible delicacy of line and richness
of colour and grace of form. His fancy decked it
with lovely trappings and set it in the fairest scenery.
His figures carried suggestions of marvellous purity
and refinement.
All this is on the side of the qualities. One might
write of them at much length, but it would be little
more than an expansion of this brief precis. And with
the last of them we begin to touch on the defect —
on the one weakness in so great strength. Surely,

HIS SIR GALAHAD 233
in his devotion to refinement, he has refined too far !
In the intent of showing us the virginal he has given
us the leanness of middle-aged maidenhood. These
are heavy-eyed, heavy-lidden maidens, moreover, as
though they had shed tears for sin of which we feel
convinced that they are not guilty ; they express a
humility or a bashfulness, by an inability to hold
their heads straight upon their shoulder,s ; it is as
though their necks were without bone and sinew.
His men, his very Vikings and heroes of classic story,
have the like negative characteristics. He has put
away from them all fleshiness to such extent that they
appear as anchorites clad in the garb of fighters,
figures in armour with a covering of skin over the
bones, but no flesh between. If these indeed be
warriors, it is as most unhappy warriors that we have
to rate them ; we can scarcely regard them as victors
in the fight ; certainly not as delighting in any joy in
victory. They are fine-drawn to the point of
emaciation ; they would all be the better for what
is vulgarly called " a full meal." We have to recog
nise that it is done in noble aspiration to show us all
that is highest and most spiritual in humanity.
It is a lofty aim that he has placed before him. His
error surely has been in going too far in the one
direction in seeking it. By this ultra-purity which he
has endeavoured to make his beautifully executed
figures express to us, he has really abstracted all that
gives purity a living value. These men and maidens
of Burne-Jones are not only without sin : they give
us the idea that they are without the wish to sin,
and that is a condition which makes sinlessness of
little worth. We can take little interest in Sir
Galahad if we suppose in him none of the tempera
ment and none of the temptation of Sir Lancelot.
Moreover, we are quite unable to believe that these
Burne-Jones maidens will be mothers of fair women

234 WATTS, MILLAIS, AND BURNE-JONES
and strong men. They have a delicacy which suggests
phthisis and anaemia rather than the healthy coursing
of red blood. When their banns are published, we
have a feeling that a tribunal of Eugenists would be
quite justified in forbidding them, on sight.
I know that this is presumptuous criticism, that
it will sound sheer blasphemy in the ears of the devout
worshipper of the beauty which Burne-Jones has
revealed to us. I contest neither the beauty nor the
revelation : I am a deeply grateful admirer of both ;
but that his types of men and women are such as we
can accept as representing humanity's best — that is
a claim with which I cannot, in all conscience, agree.
Singularly contrasted, in their outward aspect,
were those three great artists whom I have brought
together in this chapter. There was Sir John Millais,
frankly and obviously a man of the world, Mr. Watts,
with a style of dress rather individual to himself and
somewhat reminiscent of those old Italian pictures
which he loved. He sometimes wore a long robe
rather like a priest's cassock. I do not know whether
it was this that suggested the name of " Signor "
by which those adoring ladies called him. He had
an Italian look, undoubtedly. Then there was Sir
Edward Burne-Jones — both he and Mr. Watts wore
beards — the only really at all Bohemian figure of
the three. He was careless in dress, as neither of the
others was. Both those others, each in his own way,
were singularly handsome, which " B. J." (as his
friends loved to call him) was not. There was,
however, a curious charm about his thin face, and a
great gentleness that was very attractive. Despite
that gentleness, there was more real humour in
Burne-Jones, and humour with a piquant sauce to it,
moreover, than in either of the other two painters.
His letters were delightful ; always whimsical and
never ordinary ; sometimes illustrated with pictures

A PARALLEL 235
drawn as a child would draw, and incredibly badly for
one whose serious drawing was so very earnest and
so very beautiful.
Some have tried to see a parallel, in comparing these
artists with each other, between their personal
physical traits and the types that they adopted in
their pictures, finding the Millais type the most
vigorous and full-blooded, next that of Watts, and
finally that of Burne-Jones, the painter of the ascetic
type and himself with the lean look of an ascetic. It
is all rather fanciful perhaps. At all events, ascetic
though he may have been in appearance, I do not think
that we have to charge Burne-Jones with any sins
of extreme asceticism in practice. He appeared to
have an enjoyment of life which the unhappy warriors
and drooping maidens of his paintings might envy
him. But he was always a delicate man. I think
it was at The Grange, Fulham, where he had lived
nearly all through the Eighties, that he died — at
sixty-five years — an early age for a painter, for
painters are a long-lived race. Still, Millais' life
was but a year longer. Watts alone of the three
completed more than the full term, dying within three
years of ninety.,

CHAPTER XX
NELLIE FARREN AND SOME OTHER PLAYERS
[" Edmund Gurney said one evening, and Butler said he believed he
meant it seriously, and saw no fun in it, that the world had produced
four great un-self-conscious artists, viz., Homer, Raphael, Wordsworth,
and Nellie Farren." Samuel Butler, A Memoir, vol. i. p. 232.]
IN the early Eighties I was undergoing the
process called "eating dinners for the Bar "
at the Inner Temple. To say that the
dinners were " plain " is to pay them an
almost extravagant compliment. Messes of four at
a table were arranged in the fine old hall, and a single
bottle of anaemic claret was set at each table to be
the bountiful liquid complement of this number of
very plain dinners. Usually two or three friends
would mess together at a table, and for the fourth
place there was great competition to secure one of the
Indian students, from an idea, which we often found
grievously mistaken, that the religious convictions
of these Orientals forbade any looking upon the wine
when it was red — in which case the munificent single
bottle might less inadequately serve to make glad the
hearts of three white men. The dinners were eaten
at the mediaeval hour of six, and if you were late the
meal did not count in the keeping of your term.
I dare say all these anachronisms have been corrected
now, even to the plainness of the dinners and the one
bottle of acrid claret among four, but I do not know.
The law moves slowly.
There was, however, amidst all these trials, one
compensating merit about the mediaeval hour for
dining, that the meal was concluded in perfect time to
236

THE GLAMOUR OF NELLIE FARREN 237
allow a consolatory smoke before turning in at the
Gaiety Theatre nearly opposite. We were even
young and trustful enough in those days to have faith in
the qualities of the coffee of the Gaiety bar as an anti
toxic to the Temple dinners. So we smoked and sipped
our coffee, and at eight o'clock went into the theatre.
The- Gaiety Theatre means to us comparatively little
in these days, so that the reader may well wonder
why I make all this preface and palaver to it ; but
in those days the Gaiety Theatre meant wonders. It
meant Nellie Farren, Fred Leslie, Kate Vaughan.
They were a great trio, but far and away the greatest
was the first. I often ask myself — and, comparing
notes with my contemporaries, I find that all of us
have done the same, and always with the same result
— whether it was all an affair of the glamour of first
youth : whether the reason why Nellie Farren ap
peared to every one of us, without exception, as the
most marvellous woman, in her line, that ever came
upon the stage, was that we had seen so few others ;
that our enthusiasm was in reality the child, merely,
of our inexperience. We have asked ourselves the
question as dispassionately as we may — I quite admit
that such dispassion is difficult — but the answer
which every one of us, still without exception, is
obliged to find is that there really was some quality
or qualities in this wonderful little lady which no
other has had in degree at all like hers. I believe
the answer to be correct because, after all, we did see
others, we had our opportunities of comparison.
Moreover it was not only we, young students of the
Temple and scarcely out of Oxford, who judged thus
of her in our inexperience. Our youthful verdict
was endorsed by the middle-aged and by the elderly
who had seen all sorts of stars rise and fall — Vestris,
Taglioni, or whom shall we name ?
It is not quite possible to name another ; a true

238 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
comparison with artists gone before is scarcely to be
drawn, because none of the earlier ones had just the
same opportunities. The kind of musical comedy
which we saw and heard at the Gaiety was rather a
new thing in those days. Really it was the precursor
of the Gilbert and Sullivan series which was very soon
to follow. I would not so much as say that Aladdin,
The Forty Thieves, Ruy Bias, and so on, as presented
at the Gaiety, were the inspiration of all those other
comic operas. No one can rob their joint authors
of their right to fame as creators of an original thing.
But I do think that the Gaiety series educated and
prepared the public for a proper appreciation of the
comic operas when Gilbert and Sullivan did form their
ever-blessed combination. In that sense the one may
be looked on as the parent of the other.
But whatever degree of kinship those plays at the
Gaiety might claim with what came after, nothing
exactly like them had gone before ; so that Nellie
Farren, with her supporters, appeared as a new gem
in a new setting, and the effect was heart-searching.
Naturally it is an effect which you cannot hope to
recreate by any description ; it had to be seen to be
realised. It is easy to say that she was a fine comedy
actress : it almost goes without saying, for she could
have had none such success as she achieved had she
not been to that point accomplished. But it is
after saying that obvious thing that the difficulties
begin. What else was there " to her " ; for evidently
there must have been much ?
Even when all that is said, we can still say something
else not wholly to her advantage : she had no voice
worth talking about, and certainly none to be
enthusiastic about. And yet she sang her songs,
such songs as she had to sing in those comedies — or
burlesques, or extravagancies, or whatever name is
right for such nondescript productions — to perfection,

THE COCKNEY "TANG" 239
to fascination, even to tears. There was a " tang "
in her tones, which I think came quite naturally, of
purest and most delicious Cockney. People took
up her songs, they would sing the chorus with her,
they would not be denied sharing in the positive
delight with which she appeared to give them out.
They were Cockney songs, for the most part, and the
voice was a Cockney voice, but behind the Cockney
" tang " and the Cockney humour there was ever
present the pathos which is always there in the life
of the poor of London. That is where she touched us
— with her pathos. Actually in the very " tang " of the
Cockney itself the pathetic note would wail out — in
describable in the method of its production and im-
pression, but most unmistakably and impressively there.
Let me hold yer nag. Sir ?
Tike yer little bag, Sir ?
Won't yer sky a copper ?
Thank ye, Sir.
They are not notable words, hardly on the level
of high poetry, but as Nellie Farren gave them to you
— probably as a verse appropriate to some incident of
the Arabian Nights Entertainments, for the sacred
unities of time and place were not very faithfully
observed in the Gaiety Nights Entertainments — as
she gave them they went straight to the heart.
She would have you laughing happily the one moment
and the next very near tears. That trick of touching
the emotion, however it was done, no doubt was the
trick that made her what she was, and what no one
else in her own line ever was. Calve" or Destin are the
artists, if it is possible to compare great opera with
little, with whom one might class her.
And she never was in the least degree vulgar. It
was an age of almost grosser vulgarity in the music-
hall stage than this. It was an age of dancing on
the stage in tights, an age of less feminine nudity,

240 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
both on the stage and off, than this ; but most of
what there was of the dress was worn, by the stage
dancer, skin tight. So, of course, Mrs. Grundy was
shocked. After all, is not that what an institution
such as the Gaiety stage and such an institution as
Mrs. Grundy exist for — to shock and to be shocked ?
Nellie Farren appeared to have among her gifts that
of eternal youth. She kept the stage for very many
years, and for some reason Mrs. Grundy seemed to
think it more heinous for a middle-aged than for a
youthful lady to exhibit the admirable contours of
her leg and form. But I think that really a shrewd
old Scottish woman, an aunt by marriage of my own,
put that matter in what we have to regard as its
right light. Another old lady, of her own age but
with very much less than her own large views and
incisive insight into the core of a subject, was visiting
her, and the talk turned on the stage of the day.
" Dreadful ! Shocking ! " said the visiting old lady,
at a certain juncture in the conversation. " There's
Nellie Farren — dances in tights on the Gaiety stage,
and she, a grandmother ! "
" Oh, well, my dear," replied my aunt, " if you
mayn't dance in tights when you're a grandmother
I'm sure I don't know when you may."
It was good argument, as well as good repartee, I
venture to think. Whether Nellie Farren really had
grandchildren I do not know. What a grandmother
she would have been, by the by ; what fun to be her
grandchild ! She married. Her name in private life
was Mrs. Soutar. But I do not know whether she
had any family. I think not.
The charm of her voice, then, so far as one can put
it into words, was this keen, nasal Londoner's " tang,"
with a note of the pathos and the hardness of street
life just audibly ringing, here and there, through it.
Some part of her fascination rested on that. And

DRIVING DOWN BOND STREET 241
then there was her tremendous energy, vitality,
" go " ! It was " go " that was dreadfully infectious :
it was bound to make you want to " go " too ; you
could hardly sit still in your- stall, so delightfully
catching was it. It made you feel as if life was indeed
worth living and that you must set to work, or to play,
at once, and begin to live it for all it was worth.
I remember one night being at the Gaiety with a
friend, and Nellie Farren on the stage in some act
in which part of her business was to bang a tambourine
— and she did bang it. She was a little creature, but
the energy that she put into her fist work on that
parchment was wonderful to see, and it must have
been a wonderfully tough piece of ancient sheep-skin
to stand it without breaking. The next day, in the
afternoon, I met my friend with whom I had been at
the Gaiety. " Whom do you think I saw to-day ? "
he asked me. " Whom ? " " Nellie Farren ! "
No ! where ? " " She was in a phaeton, rather a
high phaeton," he told me, " and she was driving a
pair of horses down Bond Street. She was driving
them just exactly as she banged that tambourine
last night, exactly as if she and her phaeton were the
only things that there were in Bond Street. Why she
didn't kill herself and a dozen other people and run
into a dozen other carriages I'm sure I don't know.
But I suppose the Lord looks after her."
Happily some kind providence did ; happily Nellie
Farren, whether grandmother or not at the date when
my aunt's silly old visitor came and gossiped about
her, lived on to a ripe old age, although illness
prevented her from acting for very many years.
Towards the end, long after she had retired from the
stage, some of the profession had the good thought of
getting up a " star " benefit performance for her.
It was a touching affair. There always was, as I have
tried to hint, a pathos attaching to Nellie Farren,
16

11

242 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
though she was nominally a burlesque musical artist,
and the pathos was very much in the air that night of
her benefit. Her fellow players did themselves much
honour in honouring her as they did.
She was not, according to any classical canon,
beautiful, but she had far more than her fair share of
that natural charm which is more than a mere matter
of facial lines and is so much more fascinating than
any beauty of feature. Off the stage and on, she had
this goodly heritage. Her slight, energetic, boyish
figure was perfectly adapted for her favourite parts,
and she moved with a virile grace. But she, of course,
was not the attraction of the theatre as a dancer.
The dancing of that day was quite different in style
from that which we have seen more lately at the feet
of Maud Allen or of the ladies of the Russian Ballet ;
but no dancing has shown us more grace than Kate
Vaughan's. Neither she nor Fred Leslie could ever
have brought people to the Gaiety as Nellie Farren
compelled them, and Nellie Farren might have com
pelled the appreciation and attendance of her public
even without their help ; but none the less were they
admirable aids and complements to her mastery.
Fred Leslie, besides an excellent burlesque actor,
was an accomplished man in many lines, a good
sketcher, and very agreeable companion. Essential
vulgarity was just as far from him and his art as from
Nellie Farren's own. I lost sight of him quite early,
and fear that he died very prematurely and without
real fulfilment of his high promise.
It was the day, too, of another Ellen— for the Nellie
of Miss Farren's first name really was derived from the
dignified Ellen — Ellen Terry, fascinating us all in
more serious drama. She happily is with us still, and
occasionally on the boards even now, in parts, such
as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, befitting her years.
Her voice also was, and is, part of her charm. It has

ELLEN TERRY 243
none of that gamin note which the Nellie of the
burlesque made so effective — no Cockney, natural or
acquired — but a most moving and deep tone that we
seldom hear from a woman's lips. It was no stage
trick, for it was equally audible and compelling in her
every-day talk in ordinary life. It is not my business,
however, to attempt an appreciation of this most
gifted lady who so enchanted us in the Eighties, for
the happy reason that we may still see her at times.
It is not the features of the living that I am trying to
sketch. It was obviously impossible, however, to
speak of the stage of the Eighties without the intro
duction of Ellen Terry, and it is yet more impossible
to speak of that stage without mention of Henry
Irving. And Henry Irving, though he would always
have been original and great, never would have been
all that he was, never so complete, without Miss
Terry. No actress of her day could have taken her
place in the parts which she played as complement to
Irving. Of all the rest, perhaps, her own sister Marion
might have been her best understudy ; but we can
hardly think of her as Ellen's equal, though she acted
finely. She had not all the fine subtlety nor the dis
tinction of her sister.
These were just the qualities that Irving needed in
the lady that was to lead to him, for whatever else
we may say of his acting, fine subtlety and distinction
were there, not to be questioned. What was ques
tioned, even furiously debated to the severing of
family ties and the dissolving of friendships, was
whether Irving could act at all. With his strange
figure, his voice of the occasionally affected basso
prof undo, the singular drag that he affected, both in
his stage walk and in his stage speech, all these were
mannerisms of which some men said that they were
intolerable, that he was a mass of tricks, that they
never would go and see him again.

244 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
Now in all the former part of that statement these
critics were in some measure correct — he had tricks
and mannerisms that were most tiresome — but in the
last part of this statement these same persons were
strikingly incorrect, for, in spite of all they said, they
always did go and see him again and again and again.
Whatever else he might be, Irving was always com
pelling and attracting. You might feel a repulsion,
you might say you did not care to look at him, but
look at him you would, none the less, all the while that
he was on the stage, partly by reason of these very
mannerisms. For you never quite knew what he
might do next, and did not wish to miss the new trick
or action or piece of business when it came. I have
always thought that there was a good deal of likeness
between Disraeli and Irving : both deliberately
developed the mannerisms which came natural and
easy to them into a pose calculated to attract atten
tion, the difference being that while Irving was a
professional actor and on the stage, Disraeli was an
amateur and off it. But Disraeli would have been
great in some of Irving's best parts, had he gone on
the boards of the Lyceum instead of the floor of
Westminster. Irving, just before the Eighties, had
taken the management of the Lyceum Theatre, and
forthwith he began to set us a new idea of acting,
a new idea of some of Shakespeare's characters, and
a new standard of stage decoration and the setting of
the various acts. Perhaps he overdid the pomp and
elaboration of the setting — that at least is my own
opinion ; perhaps Shakespeare plays better in that
simplest possible scenery for which he wrote. At all
events Irving, as an actor and manager, completely
realised Aristotle's idea of the " magnificent man."
Whatever he conceived was on the magnificent scale :
there was nothing ever small about it, just as there was
never any of the obvious in his way of presenting the

SIR HENRY IRVING 245
characters. Incidentally there was this further point
that he had in common with Disraeli, both were
singularly apt, agreeable, and witty speakers after
dinner or on any like occasion. So far as I am aware
Irving wisely left politics quite untouched. An actor
cannot afford to make friends with the one side at
the cost of having the other pass by the doors of his
theatre as though the plague were raging within.
Irving's face was such a very striking one that it is
difficult to imagine him playing any role just as
another man would play it, or not looking singular and
original even in the most natural action. The extra
ordinary length of the face, from the arching eyebrows
to the end of the chin, was the departure from the
normal which made it so interesting. The forehead
was low and wide, appearing lower than it really was
because of the hair worn rather long and heavy and
brought rather far down. The nose was long and
straight. The chin very long, and the line from the
nose right down the chin remarkably straight also.
So, too, the line from the forehead down the nose.
Seen full-face, the contour was an elongated oval,
the chin going away rather narrow. The head gave
the appearance of no great brain capacity ; but I
think that there was some capacious room at the back,
though the way in which he wore his hair did not give
a good chance for phrenological study.
Irving, I imagine, must have deemed the Lyceum
a lucky house for him. It is quite certain that he was
a lucky man for the Lyceum. Back in the Seventies,
when Bateman was the manager, its prospects were
not too cheerful. Then came Irving, in The Bells ;
and at once people flocked to see him. Matthias, in
that play, was one of his best parts throughout his
career. It was hardly the first part in which he had a
great success, for he had already made a hit as Digby
Grand in The Two Roses. But it made the success of

246 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
the Lyceum. Then began those friendship-severing
discussions as to his merit as an actor. People might
say what they liked of him, but they must go and
see him. The fortunes, both of Irving and of the
house, were made.
It was just prior to the Eighties that he took over
the management from Bateman, and at once he began
the sumptuous staging of plays for which that theatre
quickly became known to fame.
The plays with which he " took the town," to use
a pleasant phrase in vogue long before the Eighties,
were Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. These two,
no matter what Macbeths and Iagos he might play
later, were enough to establish him. Never had
Hamlet been seen played in that manner before.
His spare figure did not much realise the Queen-
mother's description of her son as " fat and scant
of breath," but that is thrown out as a very curious
obiter dictum. The over-thoughtful character of
Hamlet is of the kind that we associate far more easily
with the lean and sallow man, as Irving was, than with
the stout, so much so that I have always thought
that Shakespeare must have had some acquaintance
of his own in mind, when he thus sketched Hamlet
with this obese physical aspect. And I think that
Shakespeare's fat friend must have had " a liver,"
which led him into those too anxious introspections.
So, perhaps, even to this minute detail, the super-
student of human nature was exact. Nevertheless a
fat man supports his dignity on the stage with far
more difficulty than a slender, and we may recall that
in all the interest and curiosity that attached to
Sarah Bernhardt 's manifestation of Hamlet, the fact
that made it occasionally hard to accord sympa
thetic attention, and that invited the smile which is
so fatal in a tragedy-audience, was that she had tried
to conform herself to something like the contour of

A NEW SHYLOCK 247
figure which the mother's words suggested. Irving
made no such mistake as this. We may remember
that although his chief role was in tragedy, he was
splendid in comedy also ; and a man with the sense
of humour which is thus implied would hardly peril
the sublimity of his Hamlet by stuffing cushions
round his middle.
So Irving gave us the new Hamlet, to gaze on, to
wonder at, to admire, or otherwise, according to taste
— at all events to talk over, again and again. And
Miss Terry was his Ophelia. But then, if it was not
enough to invent a new Hamlet, forthwith he gave
us a Shylock who was yet again a novelty. What
will not this man reveal to us, of the unexpected, in
Shakespeare, we began to ask ? And was it revelation
in the sense of unfolding Shakespeare's conception,
or was it a creation of his own that he was giving us,
not in Shakespeare's intention at all ? We asked
that question also ; and most of us answered the last
clause affirmatively : this was a Shylock according to
Henry Irving rather than a Shylock according to
William Shakespeare. Already we had seen the
dramatist's Jew alternatively presented. The old
idea had been of the crawling, cringing creature,
ready for any man's tongue to abuse or toe to kick.
Then we had a new revelation, with a cruel, hard,
remorseless, bloody-minded Jew, scarcely human,
and only to be admitted as a fellow creature because
his own inhumanity was somewhat condoned by the
inhumanities Christianity practised on him and his.
We had seen these two ; and then Irving came on the
stage, presenting us with a dignified, patrician old
Jewish gentleman — cruel, to be sure, but with a cold
and polished cruelty perhaps quite as deadly but
certainly not nearly so brutal as the former. I do not
say that this was the Shylock of Shakespeare. I do
not think that he was. Nor, of course, was it a

248 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
rendering likely to give all satisfaction to those whose
idea of the Jew of Venice — as Shakespeare meant
him — was already fixed. But at least he gave them
cause to think. Again he roused friendship-severing
debate. Again he posed a problem.
Unquestionably he was a genius, no matter what
definition we adopt of that elusive quality. He had
the originality of genius, its high ideals, and its infinite
capacity for taking pains ; for there was no pains
that he would not take to get the setting of his scenes,
the robes, and so on, just right, even as he would spare
himself no personal pains in polishing his performance
to the last point. No actor ever paid the public
greater respect. There was no detail in which he
neglected them or treated them lightly, saying, " This
is good enough for them. " It was not good enough for
him, unless it were the best that he knew, and he
would give them no less.
Irving's Shylock was a creation of genius, and it was
supported most fascinatingly by the Portia of Ellen
Terry. That great and charming actress never had
a part more adapted to display her delicacy and her
dignity. She really was the very incarnation of the
youthful " Daniel come to judgment " with her deep
grave voice, her slender young grace, and her con
summate art. Those tones, now witching, now
damning, as she modulated them to the occasions of
the baffled murderous Jew, seemed almost to hint at a
prevision on Shakespeare's part that some such
creature as this would some day step to the boards
for the portrayal of one of the most finely conceived
and finely executed persons of his stage.
So Irving went on, generally with Miss Terry beside
him, acting and entertaining and interesting us all
through the Eighties, and the Nineties also, although
interrupted for a long while towards the end of the
century by illness. With Miss Terry he went to

IRVING'S KINDLINESS 249
America more than once, and played to full houses
and appreciative audiences there as here. He was
in harness — actually on tour — when he died at
Bradford in 1905, a man of whom even those who
disliked his acting would admit, perforce, that he did
more for the stage of England than any other single
man, the playwrights apart, has ever done.
There was one side of Henry Irving, the kindly side,
which the public did not know. Neither did I know
it. But I do know from what many have told me
how grateful they have had occasion to be for kind
and helpful words from the great actor when they were
making their first little essays in the art of which he
was master. What is better known is his generosity
in giving to charitable objects and in aiding struggling
players. Friends of his early days in Bristol have
told me that the good which he did without his name
appearing as a donor was far greater than any one
knew, or than more than a very few suspected. That
highest honour which our nation pays its great dead, of
burial in Westminster Abbey, was surely well deserved
by Henry Irving. Other men, in other walks of life,
in the Eighties, may have made a larger and deeper
impression on the history of the time : assuredly no
more striking or interesting figure appeared upon
its stage.
Irving dominated the theatrical stage of this
decade, just as certainly and completely as Mr.
Gladstone dominated what we call the political stage ;
but it was a period of production and performance
of a very high level of merit at other theatres besides
the Lyceum. There was Charles Wyndham at the
Criterion ; Hare and the Kendals at the St. James's ;
Beerbohm Tree, towards the latter end of the
Eighties, at the Haymarket, and so on. Tree carried
on the splendour and elaboration of scenery and set
ting which Irving had introduced. His best parts

250 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
were those in which a strong melodramatic interest
blended. He had not quite the subtlety nor the
simplicity required for the playing of modern domestic
life. He was always a theatrical actor. His Grin-
goire was perhaps the best thing that he did. Later,
his Svengali in Du Maurier's Trilby was a great
piece of acting and haunted one for days. It made
a very satisfactory kind of nightmare for Frank
Lockwood, the Q.C., as he has recorded in one of his
humorous sketches. But the parts which we used
to go to see him play in the Eighties were such as he
took in Jim the Penman and A Man's Shadow. These
were melodramas that gave him just the opportunity
of which he was able to take the best advantage.
However, it is but fair to his memory, after thus criti
cising his acting of parts which were not relieved
by strong " character " touches, to say that it was
in the presentation of a figure which had little of
these aids for the " character " actor to lay hold of
that he made his first hit, namely in The Private
Secretary. That was his first real success. But no
other actor that I can remember so effectively realised
the Fat Boy's ambition of making your flesh creep.
He was aided in this by a figure as unlike that of the
original fat boy as possible, who really must have
lived under a rather cruel handicap against the
achievement of his aims. Tree was tall and dignified.
His Svengali really was terrific. One wept for
Trilby. He was a kindly and beloved man in his
private life and welcome for a curious, absent-minded,
whimsical humour. Beerbohm was the family name,
the Tree merely taken on for the stage, and his brother
(or is it only half-brother ?) Max Beerbohm made it
a very well-known name later, by his caricatures and
by his witty essays on men and things.
A delightful face, with an ironic blend of humour
and cynicism, was Charles Wyndham's. It grew

SIR CHARLES WYNDHAM 251
to wear a look of great pain and stress towards the end,
and it is to be feared that he had to suffer much
physical pain. These lines were not writ upon it, or
only lightly and incipiently, in the Eighties. But
even then it had its very expressive and keenly
intelligent aspect. And surely if trouble were to
write them — trouble of a domestic character, trouble
of his own seeking and well-deserving — then surely
they had every reason to be graved on Wyndham's
countenance, for his life on the stage seemed to be
spent in perpetual hot water. He was always
delightful in the midst of his worst villainies : always
it was he, who was singularly ill-deserving of it, that
had all our sympathy — never his victims, who merited
everybody's pity. Through it all, he was always a
gentleman. He failed to disguise that distinction
even in that most painful scene in David Garrick,
where a high sense of chivalry demands that the
hero shall show himself to deadly disadvantage before
the face of his beloved : even there it was no worse
than a drunk gentleman, never a drunk cad, that he
could force himself to appear. It was in that role
that he touched the highest level of his art. His
innate and expressed refinement only added to the
pain of all who had to witness this really heart
rending performance, admirably, almost too admir
ably, as it was given. Another classical part in which
he was quite first-rate was that of Charles Surface.
He produced at the Criterion most of Henry Arthur
Jones's plays, such as The Liars, and Rebellious Susan.
Sometime in the Eighties he engaged as his leading
lady Miss Mary Moore, as her stage name was, and
this was as happy a combination as that of Miss Terry
and Henry Irving at the Lyceum. Miss Moore was
then, I think, the wife of James Albery, the playwright.
Had Wyndham only been given better health he
might have gone on delighting us many years after

252 NELLIE FARREN AND OTHER PLAYERS
he virtually quitted the stage. It was not given
to him, as to Irving, to work up to the end. But in
the Eighties he was at his most effective and most
delightful best.
If one had taken a referendum of all the actors of
that day, I believe that the man whom they would
have voted top of their profession, as the supreme
artist and craftsman of them all, was none of those
that I have named, neither Irving, nor Wyndham,
nor Tree, nor any other than John Hare. He was a
favourite with the public, a popular actor enough,
and in private life a very well liked man, but it was
among the actors, among those who were profession
ally trained to appreciate the points of fine acting,
that Hare was so appreciated. He was great in those
parts which did not seem constructed to give oppor
tunities for an actor to show greatness. He could
make a character live when it had no particular
saliencies of disposition, no peculiarities, no oddities,
no attributes excessively emphasised or thrown into
high relief. He could act the ordinary, every-day life,
and yet make it seem like life and not the mere strut
and squeak and gesticulation of a puppet. Therein
lay his strength. It was the kind of performance
that would not take the eye of the ignorant and the
uncritical, but it won enthusiastic appreciation from
those who had the training or the insight needed for
the recognition of its merit. Hare was with the
Kendals at the St. James's all through the Eighties ;
but I must confess that it was a little later, in the
Nineties, that I have my most vivid recollection of
him. He had then migrated to the Garrick, where he
was manager, and brought out several of Pinero's
great plays. But the play in which I remember him
best was The Pair of Spectacles. It was perfect art.
Just as the play itself was Grundy's finest production,
so it brought out the best that Hare ever touched.

J. L. TOOLE 253
And it seems difficult to imagine how that best could
be improved on.
Among the several theatres that came into being
at just about this fortunate period of the drama's
history in England was Toole's. Toole was a delight
ful man, cheery and humorous, off the stage as on.
We did not see a great deal of him in London, for
though he started the theatre there which he called
by his own name, he spent most of his time on tour,
with one or other of his companies, in the provinces.
He really seems to belong, chronologically as regards
the stage, to an earlier date than this, because he
was in some sort a survival of an older and almost
extinct school of comic actors. He was quite a
" type," but typical rather of the earlier past than of
the Eighties, although he well outlived that decade.
You might almost think him one of Dickens's charac
ters stepping out of the novels on to the stage. But
though his art was not " up-to-date " — to use that
ugly useful piece of slang which America has given us
— it was art which achieved its end, of drawing
audiences and keeping them excellently amused.
Toole's name was never mentioned without sending
a happy smile round the faces of a company, and he
was loved for his kindly nature as much as he was
appreciated as an entertainer.
And then there was another theatre which appeared
as the setting for some very bright particular stars
in the Eighties : this was the Savoy. But the story
of the Savoyards is one that must have a chapter of
its own.

CHAPTER XXI
W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
ALREADY, when we were undergraduates at
the beginning of the Eighties, and before
we had even started to eat those mediaeval
dinners for the Bar which were so con
venient for a look in at the Gaiety Theatre afterwards,
we had begun to sing, not too melodiously, at our
" Wines," by way of a change from more time-
honoured ditties :
My name is John Wellington Wells,
I'm a dealer in magic and spells ;
In ready-filled purses.
And blessings and curses,
In prophesies, witches, and knells.
So if any one anything lacks,
He'll find it all ready in stacks,
If he'll only look in
On the resident Djinn,
Number 70 St. Mary Axe.
Thus, or somewhat thus, it went, from that delect
able opera The Sorcerer, which was one of the earliest
that W. S. Gilbert produced in his most fortunate
collaboration with Arthur Sullivan. But many years
before, almost in our nurseries, and certainly in our
schooldays, we had been reciting :
Amongst them was a Bishop who
Had lately been appointed to
The balmy isle of Rum-ti-foo,
And Peter was his name.
254

{From a photograph by Messrs^ Russell & Sons.)
SIR W. S. GILBERT.

254]

THE "BAB BALLADS" 255
This Gilbert was born actually as long ago as 1836.
One could not well believe it in the Eighties. It was
then that I had the fun of meeting him first, and I
hardly regarded him as at all older than myself. No
doubt this was partly because the man was at heart so
young and gay — not only then, but a great deal later,
even to the last. Who might not keep young if his
mind was for ever turning and twisting itself about
in such whimsical and metrical caprices as he used to
give us ? Surely the reader does not need to be told
that that second quotation, about the dignitary of
the Church, is taken from the immortal Bab Ballads !
The name exactly fits the spirit of the poems, but it
was not coined for the book. " Bab " was the pen-
name which Gilbert took when he wrote in Fun, that
extinct and not always funny journal which, with
Judy, was at one time rival of the great Punch who,
unlike the poor hero of the puppet show whose name
he bears, seems to live even more vigorously and
gloriously on the dead and buried bodies of his foes.
Gilbert's father had been a man of letters and had
written a novel or two, which no one now remembers.
But this gives us an idea that W. S.'s talent, though,
truth to say, not lacking in originality, was in some
small measure an inheritance. For what career the
son was intended I find it rather hard to guess, for
at one time, if I mistake not, he was in the Forfar
and Kincardine Militia (and why in a Scottish corps
when, so far as I am aware, he had no Scottish
connection — who can say ?) ; and then again he was
at the Bar, one of the relatively briefless. I think
that he had a turn in some Government office, too.
So his experience was varied.
Providence perhaps was working for him in its
mysterious ways all the while, though at the moment
he probably did not see its guiding hand very clearly
or very gratefully ; but may we not perceive how each

256 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
and all of these professions and these professors
became grist to that slow-grinding mill of ironies
which was subconsciously on the twirl all the while
in Gilbert's brain ? The men of the sword, the men
of the gown, the men of the office stool, all come in
for his satire and for our entertainment, in their turn.
" They'll none of them be spared," to parody his own
words. I have said that Fun was not always funny — had
it been it would be living Fun to-day — but Gilbert,
with the signature of" Bab," never failed to be funny.
Over that signature the ballads came out which were
published later in the book. And he could draw, too :
his gift for comic strokes was only second to his
gift for comic words. He had even begun with the
strokes before the words, for I think that he had
comically illustrated some of his father's books before
he " commenced author " with his own pen.
I have said that he looked far younger, in the
Eighties, than he was, and have said, too, that no man
could well feel other than young when he had such
humorous conceits ever dancing in his brain ; but I
do not know that he invariably made every one about
him feel young and gay. I understand that in the
common composition of ink there is a modicum of
acid, but it seemed as if that modicum had been
increased to a maximum in the composition in which
Gilbert steeped his pen. It was his pen-work that
went out to the public, by which they judged and
extolled him, but his tongue, in conversation, was quite
as aspish as his pen. The man John Toole, the out
lines of whose portrait I just suggested at the end of
the last chapter, was one of those of whom it might
be said that he went through life without making an
enemy. That is by no means to be said of Gilbert.
Life, just at first, does not seem to have used him very
kindly. He was disappointed in an ambition to

ACID IN THE INK 257
enter the regular army and to become a gunner, in
the Royal Artillery ; as barrister he had to go through
all the embittering processes of hopes deferred ; I
believe that he found the career which a Government
office promised dull to the point of suicide. And in
each of these attempts at making good he had found
men, whom he must have known to have brains of
not half the agility or subtlety of his, making better
than he, for one reason or other, was able to. It
is not the kind of youthful experience which sets
a man at peace with his world. Gilbert was certainly
never wholly at peace with it even after he had made
very good, and a great deal better than any of those
who had outstripped him at the start found any
possibility, in their talents, of making. The youthful
impressions go deep and they do not easily get worked
out. So we may imagine him, I think, in those days
of his disillusionment turning what appeared to be
the ill-favours of Fortune over and over in his mind,
finding them very bitter, and at the same time coining,
in an extraordinarily ingenious and prolific mint,
biting criticism of those who seemed to be leaving him
behind. That they did not in the long run defeat
him, that he came at length to a goal of fame which
they could not even hope to see afar off, did not
make any difference. The natural milk of his
human kindness had gone just a little acid. He was
never quite able to correct it. With that ironic wit
of his, the temptation to the biting word must have
been very hard to resist. As a matter of fact I do
not know that he ever made any very determined
effort to resist it. A man generally enjoys the use of a
tool or weapon with which he is conscious that he is
adept. Gilbert had all this consciousness of mordant
wit, and appeared to have full enjoyment of it. One
might quote endless instances. Many have been
quoted already. Of a famous actor, essaying the
17

258 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
role of Hamlet, while a company of people were
condemning and ridiculing the personation, Gilbert,
with the air of one trying to introduce a little more
Christian charity into the criticism, remarked :
" Oh, I don't think  's Hamlet is so bad." Then
added : " It's funny, without being vulgar." That,
with the semblance of a kindly comment, has a barb
of wit which makes the malicious arrow stick, while
all blunt damnation of the poor actor's well-meant
work would be long forgotten. I am afraid this is
too well known for the reader to have the least
difficulty in filling in the name for which I have set
a blank. That is the worst of quotation of Gilbert's
gibes. Unless one has his own callousness to the pain
that he gave, one must leave out the names, and with
that omission some of the point goes, too. How
excellent, but how acid, was that reply to one who
asked him " Which do you think the best of R. L.
Stevenson's books ? " " Oh, Travels with  "
(naming an enthusiastic appraiser of R. L. S.'s
writings) " in the Cevennes." The companion whom
that agreeable book of travel has made immortal had,
it may be remembered, long ears and four legs.
In company with an American friend, to whom
he was showing the sights of London, he was being
taken over Westminster Hall by a member of the
House of Commons, who drew attention to the fine
roof. " Of what wood ? " the visitor from the States
asked. " Oak, I think," said their guide. " Some
say it is English chestnut, but I don't believe myself
that at the time when this was built there were enough
old chestnuts in England to provide the material."
" Probably not," put in Gilbert, " — r— 's Memoirs
had not been published then."
These and the like little comments are very apparent
examples of the " gentle art of making enemies,"
as Whistler called it, at just about the same time.

THE WOLF CLAD IN FLEECE 259
Gilbert probably did not mind. He had much en
joyment out of life, but universal popularity was not
an element in it.
As a rule, when the Creator puts out a piece of
human workmanship of an uncommon quality He sets
His hall-mark upon it. The exceptional man does
not usually look just like the rest of the crowd. But
I do not think this final pains had been taken in the
issuing of Gilbert. There is no doubt whatever that
he was a man of quite uncommon gifts, of wit and
irony, but I never could see that his lines and features
gave token of any remarkable capacity. It may have
been my own dullness in deciphering them, and
perhaps keener eyes saw more. To me he had the
aspect of a sensible, solid country gentleman — one who
might be good at Quarter Sessions. As a matter of
fact Gilbert, from all I have heard, was this : he was
a magistrate, and did his work well in the county ;
but he was also a good deal more than this. We
may imagine his fellows on the Bench standing, or
sitting, in considerable awe of him. He was not
a man with whom one differed very readily, nor
without fear of some sharp punishment. I do not
know what his family motto was, but I do know very
well what motto I should have handed out to him
personally, if he had applied to me for one as a
member of the Herald's College : Nemo me impune
lacessit. That would have fitted him admirably,
and at the same time, if he would have worn it legibly
on his shield, might have served as a salutary warning
to others. As it was, his rather harmless and by no
means formidable aspect was such as to dispose
unwary strangers to quite an opposite opinion of him,
and tempted them to indiscretions, that cost them
dearly, which they would not have ventured if he
had only looked a little more dangerous. The wolf is
especially to be feared when he wears the fleece.

26o W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
I believe Gilbert to have been essentially, and at
heart, an exceedingly kind man. He would do any
friend, and very likely a foe too, if he did not happen
to have a quarrel with him at the moment, a kindness ;
but it seemed to be very hard for him to say a kind
ness. And it never seemed at all difficult for him to
say an unkindness, if only he might point it with a
glint of wit. A kind man in deed, not a kind man in
word, is a summing up that we might make of him,
and at least that is better than its opposite.
But if this seems only a grudging estimate, we may
give him thanks with no grudging, no reserve at all,
for all that he did for us in the way of our delight and
our entertainment. A dull man, or a man of no more
than ordinary powers, might work his life long in
acts of kindness, yet never do one tithe of what Gilbert
did towards making the world more joyful and more
happy. It is rather pathetic that it should be so,
but it is all part of the pathos of life's handicap which
we can never throw off us. This Sorcerer, which I
have mentioned, was not the first of Gilbert's pro
duction in partnership with Sullivan, but it was
among the first. The actual first was Thespis, as
early as 1 871, of which I have no personal recollection
at all; and it was followed in 1875 by Trial by Jury.
Then, in 1877, came The Sorcerer. It was a distinct
advance on the Trial by Jury, and, as I believe, on
Thespis also, in its aim and its scope. It had a plot,
and it was a connected piece of several acts. It was
a play. The Savoy Theatre as yet had no existence. The
Sorcerer was given at the Opera Comique — I think
under D'Oyly Carte's management. So, too, were
the next three — the three P's : Pinafore, The Pirates
of Penzance, and Patience. The success of each
exceeded that of the one before. Then, in 1881,
D'Oyly Carte opened the Savoy, which had been

THE SAVOY THEATRE 261
expressly designed for the operas of Gilbert and
Sullivan — a glowing testimony to the favour which
they had already attained and the permanent hold
of that favour which this very clever and experienced
theatre manager deemed that they, or their successors,
would maintain. Certainly he was not deceived.
Patience, in high tide of booking, was transferred to
the new Savoy : the Gilbert and Sullivan opera had
come to its own home, and had " come to stay."
I do not think that the next two, however, Iolanthe
and Princess Ida, were quite up to the same level.
They never hit the public taste quite as hard. But
The Mikado which followed them has been perhaps
the most popular of the series. Then came Ruddigore,
followed by The Yeomen of the Guard ; and lastly, so
far as the Eighties went, The Gondoliers.
The conspirators who had done so excellently well
for our entertainment and, incidentally, for their own
pockets, began to fall out among themselves about
this time over the distribution of the spoils. I
believe Gilbert's only ground of complaint with
Sullivan was that Sullivan did not sufficiently join
in the complaint that he, Gilbert, made against Carte.
At all events, as between the author and the musical
composer, the rifted lute was soon set to rights again
and gave us more music in the Nineties — Utopia
Limited and The Grand Duke. It is a wonderful
record. I am very sorry that I never knew Sullivan at that
time — only later, when he was in no good health.
Indeed I believe that his health was never robust all
through life, which makes the merit, as well as the
amount, of his compositions the more remarkable.
I know nothing at all of music, but have heard many
musicians regret that he did not devote himself to great
opera, so gifted was he. Perhaps they were right,
but I can feel no share of their regret. For a great

262 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
opera or two we might have lost all those lesser works
that I have just put on the list. Gilbertian opera
without its Sullivan would be rather like Hamlet
without the Prince of Denmark. I do not mean by
that that Gilbert did not write some very pleasant
dramatic pieces in collaboration with other composers :
I know that he did : also that he was himself person
ally responsible for a few of the songs and melodies,
and not the least alluring of them, in some of the
operas in which Sullivan was working with him.
For instance, it was he, entirely, as I believe, that
created that haunting melody of the " I have a song
to sing, oh ! " But still, none but a composer of very
special gifts, and probably none who had not given
himself professionally to the composer's art, could
possibly hope to maintain that wonderfully high
level of freshness, grace, harmony, and brightness
which Sullivan carried through all his collaborations
with Gilbert.
Also, on the other side of the count, we have to
appreciate all that he actually did in more serious
musical modes. We cannot deny him, for instance,
the glory of The Golden Legend ; when a whole congre
gation joins in unison to sing, " Onward, Christian
Soldiers," they are Sullivan's notes that they are
bringing out with all their chest powers. Oh Mistress
Mine is a song which of itself would keep his memory
green ; Orpheus with his Lute is another of the same
series of five songs from Shakespeare ; the sacred
cantata The Martyr of Antioch is his ; the oratorio
The Light of the World, and very many pieces of less
or more importance. These instances are enough to
show how astray from the facts is the popular verdict
which has judged him as if he were the co-worker with
Gilbert and very little else. He actually accom
plished enough to make a very high reputation with
the whole Gilbertian series left out of the count

THE LOST SCORES OF SCHUBERT 263
altogether. Sullivan, in short, would have been as
great a man as he is (some would say that he would
have been far greater) without his Gilbert : we can
hardly imagine Gilbert as great as he is without his
Sullivan. Undoubtedly Sullivan was far more
popular socially and had more devoted friends than
Gilbert. He was quite unusually well beloved, and
by the consensus of all whom I ever heard speak of
him he was a man of extraordinarily lovable nature.
He had none of the caustic wit of Gilbert, and probably
he would not have been loved so widely and so well
had that perilous gift come his way, but he had a
bright spirit which made his company welcome
wherever he went. One of his claims on the gratitude
of all true lovers of music I had almost forgotten : he
discovered, or helped to discover, some lost musical
scores, in manuscript, by Schubert. Perhaps the
peculiar claim of his own work on the gratitude of
music lovers in a wider circle is that he revealed the
possibility of writing music which should be " popu
lar " and yet be good. As a rule, which had few
exceptions up to his time, the music which had found
favour with the people, if not bad, had been distinctly
cheap and second-rate. He proved that it was not
necessary that it should be so in order to hit their
taste. I suppose that any attempt to range the Gilbert
and Sullivan operas in an order of comparative merit
would be quite futile, even if one had the musical
ability to estimate them correctly on that side.
Iolanthe, I believe, was considered by some of the
musical critics the finest, but it was by no means the
most popular. The Mikado, with its bright dresses
and dances, its extravagant burlesque of the popular
idea of things Japanese, its thousand and one whim
sicalities, was the most appreciated by the people.
My own humble taste inclined to the three P's,

264 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
Patience, The Pirates, and Pinafore, in the order
named. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the first of them to be
produced, we have distinct echoes from the " Bab
Ballads," and especially from that " good Captain
Reece, Commander of the Mantelpiece." In The
Pirates there is less of the Ballads, and by the time
we come to Patience the writer seems to have shaken
himself quite free of their lingering influence.
None of them is altogether without some mild,
and never obtrusive, moral purpose. Gilbert had a
very shrewd eye for all that savoured of humbug, and
always had the wit at command to show it up to
ridicule. I do not know that he cared so much for
the moralities, if only he could make his point, and
especially if he could make fun of high office. " Stick
fast to your desk and never go to sea : and you all
may be the rulers of the Queen's Navy," was a gibe
at W. H. Smith as First Lord of the Admiralty. But
it is not to be supposed that Gilbert deemed W. H.
Smith to be other than a very good First Lord.
That statesman did indeed admirably realise the
successive rises in station by which Gilbert led his
office-boy to his elevation, for he did his successive
jobs, one and all, excellently well, and culminated
as one of the most successful and well-liked leaders
of the House of Commons ever known. But Gilbert
perceived that a laugh was to be got out of this lands
man and man of the City made nominal commander of
the High Sea Fleet, and wrote his libretto accordingly.
That was enough for him, and enough, too, for his
audience. Now and then the humbug that he
castigated was a pernicious piece of humbug, and
then the castigation was an agent for good. So he
achieved, here and there, a moral end ; but laughter
and entertainment, far before morality, were the aim
of all he wrote.
In Patience he had as attractive a target for a

" RUDDIGORE " AND THE BISHOP 265
sardonic humour to shoot at as the heart of wit could
desire in those singular people of the Eighties, who
were called, and who even called themselves, the
"^Esthetes." They were the subject of Du Maurier's
endless ridicule in Punch, but no one ever made them
appear so supremely absurd as Gilbert, with his
" greenery, yellowy, Grosvenor Gallery, je ne sais
quoi young man," his " out-of-the-way young man,"
and so on. Perhaps it was no very high end of
morality that he achieved in knocking all the stuffing
— if ever they had any — out of those poor posturing
figures — after all, do we not owe some gratitude for
our merriment to those at whom we laugh ? — but he
was out to attack affectation and pretence wherever
he found it, and he found it very ready to his hand
in the households of the Postlethwaites.
I often used to wonder whether it ever happened
to Gilbert to be worsted in an encounter of wit,
whether verbal or in letters. I never heard of an
instance, and should be rather grateful, even after
this lapse of years, if I could — just for novelty's sake.
All the stories went the other way, telling of Gilbert's
scores over opponents. There is one which, so far as
I know, has not found its way into print about a
certain Bishop who wrote expostulating with him,
soon after the production of Ruddigore, for the choice
of such an unsavoury title. Gilbert wrote back a
long and, in form, exceedingly courteous answer,
explaining to the Bishop that all depended on the
sense in which the title was understood — that any
possible offence, in fact, existed in the mind of the
reader and not of the writer. The case was purely
one of honi soit qui mal y pense. " So much," wrote
Gilbert, " I would remind your lordship, must always
depend on the sense in which words are understood.
I will, if you will allow me, give you an instance in
point." Before going farther I must ask the reader to

266 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
pardon me if the telling of the story involves the
mention of the favourite adjective of the British Army.
That is Gilbert's fault, or the Bishop's — I am not
sure which — and Gilbert's own argument to the
Bishop which I am about to quote may be cited in its
excuse. " If I were to say to your lordship," he
wrote, " who has done me the honour to address me
about the title of my play, that I admired (which
I do not) your blooming complexion, your lordship
might be graciously pleased to accept it as a high
compliment ; but if I were to say precisely the same
thing to your lordship, in a slightly different form of
words, and were to affirm that I wondered at (which
I certainly do) your lordship's bloody cheek, your
lordship might not be at all disposed to accept the
sentiment with equal gratitude. So much depends
on the sense which the mind of the recipient conveys
into the words." I do not remember hearing what,
if any, was the Bishop's reply. Possibly it took the
form of excommunication, but in that case I do not
think that Gilbert suffered greatly from its effects.
But in truth I never did hear of one who had " the
last word " in any such encounter with him. A most
dangerous man to meddle with ; a man whose edged
wit the prudent would ever prefer to leave safe-
sheathed rather than do anything to invite its keen
ness on themselves ; but a man to whom millions
have cause for profound gratitude, for his contribu
tions to the gaiety of the world, contributions which
are even yet not exhausted, for it is quite lately, as
I write, that some of the operas have been revived
and we find that time has not withered their infinite
variety. They have killed the aesthetes, and many
another mode of affectation, stone-dead, but the witty
word that killed them and the bright music to which
the word is set are still vital, and are enjoyed by
a generation that never knew the " aesthetes."

GEORGE GROSSMITH 267
We may speculate what, if anything, Gilbert would
have been without his Sullivan, and what Sullivan
without his Gilbert. Yet a third problem for our
speculation immediately presents itself : What would
either, or both, have been without their Grossmith ?
I believe it is Disraeli who is credited with saying
that there is no such thing as " a necessary man."
If he did say so, and claimed any credit for it, he took
credit for stolen goods — French goods. Be that how
it may, it is scarcely to be believed but that George
Grossmith was a necessary man to those Gilbert and
Sullivan operas. It is impossible to picture them
without him ; or, at least, if we are able to draw such
a picture, it is a picture different from any of those
at which we laughed so heartily with him in its very
fore-front. There is no argument to the contrary
in the fact that in the later revivals, which I wrote
of just above, of these operas they were without
Grossmith. He, poor fellow, died at no considerable
age, with many good years left in which he might
have played for our entertainment. But though he
was not bodily on the stage when those operas were
given again lately, his spirit was there. He had
created the parts, and his tradition was handed down
and in some degree brought to life again. He was the
hero of the various pieces, even from that very first of
the important ones, such as The Sorcerer, right on to
the end of the Eighties, when he left the Savoy and
went into the entertainment business on his own
account, rather on the lines of Corney Grain. Apart
from the ladies, who were really subsidiary, though
charming, the other stalwart support of the operas
was Rutland Barrington. His cheery presence and
stout figure is with us still, and in all bodily substance
came on the boards when some of these operas were
recently played again.
Never was there a happier contrast than these two,

268 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
Grossmith and Barrington, presented. Each was just
made to be the other's foil. Corney Grain, poor
fellow, a very Yorick of good company, comes into
one's head very readily on mention of Grossmith by
reason of a very excellent and very well-known
caricature of the two together early in the Eighties,
done by Leslie Ward, the " Spy " of Vanity Fair.
There is Corney Grain, colossal in size, smiling down
indulgently on a tiny George Grossmith, whose insect
like tenuity of limb and waist and feature is exag
gerated by the art of the caricaturist, and who is
looking up at the smiling giant with a chiding fore
finger raised in protest at some enormity committed
by the enormous man. It is very pleasant fooling.
And very much like this contrast, which " Spy " has
turned to such good account, between the two enter
tainers, was the contrast between the figures of
Grossmith and of Barrington on the stage. Barring
ton was not quite so tall as Grain, but he was tall
enough, and just as bulky. Anything more waspish
than the thinness and fragility of Grossmith it is
impossible to conceive. Perhaps it should be gnat-ish,
rather than waspish. He did not suggest a creature
with any envenomed sting, but rather a restless,
buzzing thing, ever about your head, ever ready to
give you pin-pricks. He would dart and dance
around the stolid bulk of Barrington in all directions,
bewilderingly agile ; Barrington standing unmoved
and unruffled the while. It was like the encounter
of Dignity and Impudence. In one of his acts, I
think in The Mikado, he had developed the faculty of
sitting down into the cross-legged tailor's attitude
with a suddenness that was scarcely human, and
scarcely like a living thing at all : more like the action
reversed of a Jack-in-the-box, jumping down into
his box instead of up and out of it. And he used at
times to play this trick while in perfectly serious

HIS ELVISH WAYS 269
conversation with a friend, or even with a stranger,
who would, of course, be terribly disconcerted. At
one moment you found yourself looking at George
Grossmith's face, more or less on a level with your
own ; the next moment it had vanished, and, going
in search for it, you found it away down looking up
at you from a figure in straddle-legged contortion at
your feet. It was the act of an elf, and Grossmith
really was most delightfully elvish in all his ways.
A very great feature of these operas, as goes almost
without the saying, was the songs. Everybody with
any ear at all caught their rippling melodies and
whistled or sang them. And it is a curious thing that
though they made of these songs such delightful and
infectious things, still Grossmith and Barrington
did not seem to have enough lungs to make one able-
bodied man's voice between them. Yet Rutland
Barrington, at all events, had sufficient lung capacity.
I suppose it is the more to their credit as clever
utterers of " patter " and of quips and cranks that
they could make it all so attractive without great
volume of sound. But if Grossmith was no Boanerges,
he had at least one capacity which was of inestimable
value for the rendering of such words and music as
Gilbert and Sullivan put into his mouth. He could
bring the words out, racing after one another with a
most terrific speed, and yet each one vocalised so
distinctly that even a deaf man could not miss it.
That was a much more useful gift for songs of just
that kind than the voice of a Caruso would have
been. Of course the ladies had delightful songs, too,
and sang them delightfully : " Three little maids from
school are we," and so forth. But my concern is not
with them. They were young, and doubtless are
still alive. Grossmith was the Puck-like creature who
held this stage, playing antics on the solemn back-

270 W. S. GILBERT AND THE SAVOYARDS
ground of Rutland Barrington — solemn, be it said,
only as solemnity fitted the humour of the piece, for a
person more bubbling with fun never was seen.
Grossmith has left us sons, with something of his own
special gift. His brother, Weedon, a real comedian,
in quite another line, died only in 1919. There was a
fairy godmother hovering near, at the christening of
all these Grossmiths, as we must think. Weedon, of
whom I have heard men say that no one on the stage
ever amused them so much — he generally took the
" fool-of the family " kind of part — was a painter of
much merit before he took to the stage, and had pic
tures in the Academy. Besides his genius as a player
in those roles for which Gilbertian opera gave him
his opportunity, George could compose his own songs,
both words and music, and when he took to drawing-
room entertainment, after he severed connection with
the Savoy, his own compositions made quite a useful
part of his repertoire.
Speculation on what might have been if things had
happened differently is always interesting, though
always perhaps barren. It is scarcely possible
to conceive of the Savoy operas played without
Grossmith, or at least without the tradition that he
bequeathed to them, in the chief role. Presumably
they would have been played successfully, on their
own merits, if some other than Grossmith had been
in the parts which he created. That would have hap
pened, no doubt ; but it is very difficult to imagine
in what manner it would have happened, and how
those parts could have been played much otherwise
than as Grossmith played them. Played successfully
they might, and probably would, have been, but
they would have been played quite differently.
Grossmith's genius was peculiarly a personal one.
We should have had quite a different conception of
the Gilbert and Sullivan series from that which he so

CORNEY GRAIN 271
helped to give us. And we do not want it bettered :
we may be grateful that we had it as it was.
Incidentally, and chiefly as a foil to Grossmith in
Leslie Ward's picture, I have mentioned Corney
Grain. He is deserving, however, of an honourable
niche of his own among the entertainers of the
Eighties, for he really set a fashion. He was among
the first to go round — " Piano and I '"<¦ — and give his
recitals in private houses. He was, if I remember
right, among the army of the comparatively briefless
at the Bar, and realised that he had talents which he
could turn to better account than seemed likely in his
profession. He was welcome everywhere, whether
in the new profession of his adoption or as a friend,
for he was the most cheery of companions. The
" funny without being vulgar " label is one that can
hardly be applied without a smile at its cruel ironic
use by Gilbert, quoted a page or two back, but it
fitted Corney Grain's songs and " patter " to admira
tion, and it was an age when the one without the other
was rather novel. He set the vogue for a host of
followers, Grossmith himself among them ; and perhaps
with the single exception of Grossmith none have
quite rivalled him. The big man sitting down at the
piano, before a room full of people, with an assumed
solemnity on his face, and in a very few minutes
reducing a fashionable assembly to helpless laughter,
was a sight of wonder. The gaiety of one nation, at
least, suffered serious eclipse through his comparatively
early death.

CHAPTER XXII
THE ".ESTHETES " AND OSCAR WILDE
IT is hardly possible now to credit the existence of
those people, the " ^Esthetes " of the Seventies
and Eighties. One can hardly believe them
real. The young person of to-day, looking over
the pages of Punch in the golden days of Du Maurier,
may say, after his or her manner, " Oh, this is tosh !
Of course there never were people at all like that."
We who are older know better. They were exactly
like that. They were so like it, that although we call
those pictures of Du Maurier 's " caricatures," we
know quite well that they were not caricatures at all,
in the sense of pictures exaggerating the peculiarities
of their originals. You could not caricature these
folk : they had done that for you, of themselves :
themselves were caricatures of human beings living
the reasonable life. Du Maurier had no need to do
otherwise than draw them as they were. He could
not exaggerate their absurdities.
What these people claimed for themselves was a
sensitiveness to the artistic impression entirely
superior to that of the members of the common
Philistine herd by whom they were surrounded. This
lovely sensitiveness expressed itself in the standing
in affected attitudes before any picture or thing of
what they chose to call beauty, which appealed to
their taste, or of which they thought that by affecting
the pretence of its making such an appeal they would
get the credit of being persons of a peculiar sensibility.
272

THE .ESTHETIC DROOP 273
The correct attitude to express this beautiful sensi
bility of soul was a drooping, a languid one. They
could not hold the head upright : they must droop
it or hold it sideways, like the heads of figures in
Burne-Jones 's pictures or like a lily bloom too heavy
for its stalk. Everything about them must fall and
droop. Their hair must be worn long — I write this
of the men, of course — the drapery must be flowing
and falling ; it must not seem as if it was fitted to the
figure at all — this is to be said of both women and
men, for though the former could most easily so
modify the existing fashion as to let the garments fall
in the manner of a bath towel carelessly thrown upon
the shoulders and allowed to trail, still the men could
do something in this line too, by wearing a long frock
coat, a collar cut low, flowing tie, and baggy (a
word calculated to make their delicate frames
shudder) trousers.
The men did their best, but the women had unfair
advantages, even in the possible form of the garments ;
and when it came to a question of their hues, of course
the mere male had no chance of competing. Some
thing he might do in the way of curiously dyed
tweeds, and possibly might affect some chaste jacket
in velvet or other pleasing material as dinner jacket
or for indoor wear at all times ; but the ladies, with
their hues — not of the rainbow as commonly under
stood ; that would have been outrageously crude
and glaring ; but of the lunar rainbow rather, or
worked out in faded reflection of the true solar effect
— they had their opportunities, which they did not
neglect, of creating harmonies such as were impossible
for the man jinless he would run the imminent risk
of being carried off and shut up in a lunatic asylum.
Even as it was, some, " for Art's sake," ran peril of it ;
and there were few but looked as if they had escaped
from some such place.
18

274 THE " ESTHETES " AND OSCAR WILDE
A curious thing is that at the back of all this mass
of posturing and affectation and absurdity there
was an honest, sincere, hard-working zeal to bring
some greater beauty into a world which had in truth
grown very ugly. I do not mean that there was any
reality at all about the people whom Du Maurier
sketched by the names of Maudle and Postlethwaite :
they were poseurs and poseuses and little more. They
affected a kind of hyper-assthesia towards Art that was
very nearly sheer nonsense. The only thing that re
deemed it at all from nonsense pure and simple was
that even such ridiculous pretence of appreciation as
this was almost better than that open and unabashed
indifference of the normal people of that day towards
things artistic. Better perhaps to make the sacred
name of beauty ridiculous than not recognise it
at all.
And then these people, whatever we may think of
them in themselves, were really the artistic posterity
of very genuine and sincere ancestry. I do not know
— I wish I did — what William Morris had to say
about them. His comments would have been inter
esting. But though they must seem very remote
indeed from that never-resting, never self-satisfied
spirit which possessed, like a demon, William Morris,
they really did inherit from the Pre-Raphaelites.
They believed themselves to be living the life beautiful,
in the garb beautiful and within the house beautiful,
and to have attuned their minds to express, by sighs
and gasps and words of appreciation which had
scarcely more definite meaning than these suspirations,
their intensity of feeling. The singular attitudes of
body were designed to testify to the same enthusiasm.
It was really a lovely ideal which they worshipped,
although their ritual was flagrantly absurd.
By far the most gifted of the devotees, and almost
the most extravagant in pose, was that morbid and

OSCAR WILDE 275
ill-destined genius Oscar Wilde. Unquestionably he
was a genius ; unquestionably, too, as I think, there
was in that genius a strain of madness. Madness
is a term admittedly difficult of definition, but,
without the necessity for definition at all, the very
fact that a man should be so utterly unable to bring
his conduct into any conformity with the conventions,
not only of the society of which he was a member but
of all civilised human societies whatsoever, is in itself
full justification for pronouncing him mad. If this
be not an example of madness we hardly know where
to look for it.
Enough said on that score. On the other side of
his very singular mentality, the saner side of that
border, so often perilously narrow, which divides
genius from madness, his gifts were quite extra
ordinary. It must have been just about the beginning of the
Eighties that he left Oxford. I must have been " up "
with him for about two years, but it was either part
of his pose, or a result of athletic disability, that he
disavowed all interest in the games and sports which,
no doubt, absorbed a great deal more of my own
attention and that of my friends than they should
have done. We, on the other hand, had extremely
little sympathy, fariless than it behoved us to feel, for
the arts, and least of all for that exaggerated and
affected sensibility to them which was the mark of
the aesthete. We heard of Wilde as decorating his
rooms at Magdalen with peacock feathers and other
strange adornments, but very few, I imagine, sus
pected the great intellectual light which he obscured
under these fantastic bushels. In 1878 he gave some
evidence of his poetical power by winning the
" Newdigate," and when he left Oxford there were
some at least of the examiners who suspected some
thing of his genius, for his paper on Greek history

276 THE ".ESTHETES " AND OSCAR WILDE
in " Greats " was said to have been quite remarkable.
He had travelled in Greece, I think with Professor
Mahaffy — his fellow countryman, for Wilde, of course,
was Irish— and his paper bore witness to a personal
knowledge of the places referred to in classical story,
as well as a brilliant interest in the stories themselves,
which examiners, harassed by the hackneyed senti
ments of the ordinary undergraduate writing on this
much worn theme, must have welcomed as most
refreshing. When he left Oxford and went to London his place
among the aesthetes was already assured by his
adoption of their most extreme fads, quite apart
from the position to which his literary gifts entitled
him. He was recognised even then as a brilliant
and original, though tiresomely affected, talker. He
was reputed to be an unblushing thief of other men's
good sayings — the a propos retort of Whistler to him
in that connection has been told too often for yet
another repetition. In truth, his conceit was so
colossal that it was impossible to abash him. The
ordinary poseur endeavours to conceal his pose :
often he is even a poseur unwittingly, not knowing'
himself. But Wilde knew himself perfectly for a
poseur, and made no effort to conceal it. He de
liberately adopted the role, and may be said to have
actually posed as a poseur. Evidently that is a
position from which no ridicule or sense of shame can
shake a man. With his self-conceit, and as a very part
of it, was mingled a great dose of obstinacy. He
judged himself not only to be cleverer and to know
better than most other men, in which he was perfectly
correct, but also to be wiser and to know better than
the collective wisdom of men who had spent their
lives in special studies. Thus he was at times the
despair of the actor-manager when he began to write
his brilliant plays, because he would accept no

OSCAR WILDE.

276!

HIS FIRST PLAY 277
guidance from their stored knowledge, but would
insist on situations and denouements which all the
history of the stage had proved to be impossible
of favourable presentment. George Alexander com
plained of him to me most bitterly in this connection,
speaking of his " damned Irish obstinacy." Wilde's
view of his own opinions and his own productions
was that they were above rules. Rules, confirmed
by the experience of ages, might serve as useful
guides for other men. He, Wilde, was above them.
Really it was very like a kind of megalomania, and was
destined to be a large element in his ultimate undoing.
The first play of any importance which he ever did
write was, so far as I know, The Duchess of Padua,
especially designed for Mary Anderson, though she
never produced it. This was as early as 1883. It
was a five-act tragedy. Apparently he had yet to
discover his brilliant capacity for comedy which he
demonstrated triumphantly in Lady Windermere's
Fan and The Importance of being Earnest. The dia
logue was unfailingly sparkling and witty. Its
artifice was often quite obvious, and he worked very
hard his favourite trick of giving a turn, the most
opposite to expectation, to very trite comments.
" Never buy a thing you don't want because it is
dear " may serve as a type of many of the kind. Still,
they were delightfully entertaining plays, despite
the tricks, and how excellent was the fooling in The
Importance of being Earnest was effectively proved
quite lately in a very recent revival.
In conversation he would often affirm the most
impossible theories, as that no modern literary work
of any worth had been produced in the English lan
guage by an English writer, and would support it
by argument of extraordinary and original whimsi
cality. " I will make one exception," he said ; " I will
grant you Bradshaw."

278 THE ".ESTHETES " AND OSCAR WILDE
That his wit was always impromptu would be too
much to assert. Often it bore witness of being long
elaborated, but he had a genius for leading conversa
tion to his cue. When some Nonsense Rhymes —
that admirable invention of Lear, followed by a host
of imitators — were being quoted, Wilde said, with
all the air of composing the lines as he spoke, " I
think this would make a good one :
There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was very much stung by a wasp ;
When they said, " Did it hurt ? "
He replied, " No, it didn't ;
I thought all the time it was a hornet."
It was only long after the laugh had subsided that
some one recalled the fact that Wilde, doubtless
with this priceless composition already rehearsed
and polished, had started the quotations !
No one, I imagine, seeing Wilde for the first time,
would have given him credit for quick wit or ready
brilliancy. His round, heavy, pallid, and moon-like
face, clean shaven at a time when moustaches were
in universal vogue, gave the impression of a slow
thinker. He had plenty of cranial capacity, for brain,
but he looked like a man far more likely to produce
some weighty volume on German philosophy, if he
produced any intellectual output at all, than ultra
modern comedy scintillating with a wit that was
Gallic rather than Teutonic. Of all his varied work,
perhaps the most sincere and the most really worthy
of him was that piteous Ballad of Reading Gaol, wrung
from the depths of his tortured and penitent soul.

CHAPTER XXIII
W. G. GRACE
IT used to be said, in the Eighties, that the best
known man in England was the then Prince of
Wales, later King Edward VII, and the second
best known, W. G. Grace. I do not think the
statement was exact. It might serve for London,
where the heir to the throne was a familiar figure,
but taking all the country over, towns and villages
alike, I believe that that royal personage would not
have been recognised, in spite of all the picture
papers, nearly so readily and generally as " W. G."
Of course " W. G." had an immense advantage, if
it be an advantage to be thus recognised by the
multitude, in his singularly recognisable figure — you
could not forget him if you once had seen him.
He was immense, both in height and bulk, taller in
reality than he looked just because the bulk disguised
the height. And then he had that big red face, and
that big black beard. He would serve quite well for
the figure of the ogre in a child's picture book — a very
kindly ogre withal.
I heard two in a Club — the sort of place where
you do hear pernicious nonsense — debating who
had deserved the better of his country, who had
given more delight in his generation, " W. G." or
" W. E. G." Is it necessary to remind a modern
audience that the latter were the initials of Mr.
Gladstone ? Of course the debate was futile : it is
as vain as the assertion we have seen that Pitt was
279

280 W. G. GRACE
a greater man than Shakespeare. The two " great
nesses " are not comparable, in the one case more
than in the other : there is no common standard of
measurement. One of my men in the Club said,
"Go to the Reform — you will there hear that
Gladstone is the greatest man the world has ever
known, that Disraeli is the most pernicious. Go into
the Carlton, there they will tell you that Disraeli is
the great man of the world and that Gladstone is
everything that is evil. The opinions balance each
other, so that the sum total is zero to the credit of
either. But go into any Club that you please, along
St. James's Street and Piccadilly and Pall Mall, ask
them about ' W. G.,' and every one of them will tell
you the same story about him, that they are grateful
for his existence, that he is a real benefactor, that he
has given joy to thousands."
That at least is true, and on that count we may
rank " W. G." with the prima donna and the great
actor. He was an actor, the finest we have ever had,
on the twenty-two yard stage between the wickets —
tragic, for the bowler and the side opposed to him,
yet with an element of comedy always about him.
You never hear any one speak of " W. G." even now
without a smile of amusement curling up the lip
both of speaker and listener. He was both to be
laughed at and to be laughed with ; but perhaps you
had better do the former, at all events, with discretion.
He was too big a man to be trifled with, and though he
was kindly he was quite self-assertive. Sometimes
they said that he was inclined to be rather too assertive
of his rights, if not of a shade more than his strict
rights, in the cricket field, but we have to remember
that all that side of games, even of our greatest game,
is governed by tradition, and that the tradition in
which " W. G." and his brothers had been reared in
Gloucestershire and the West was not precisely the

(From a photograph by Lionel Wood, Brighton.)
DR. W. G. GRACE.

280]

"ALL IN THE GAME" 281
same as that which prevails at Eton and Oxford, or
Harrow and Cambridge, and so on. There was just a
little of the " win, tie, or wrangle " business about the
game in the provinces, especially perhaps in the West,
and it was all considered perfectly fair business, and
" all in the game," so to say. " W. G." really was
not unsportsmanlike in insistence on points about
which an Eton or Oxford captain, let us say, would
not have insisted, because it was only part of the
custom of his county and of the game as he knew it
to be thus insistent ; and he would not have resented
at all a like insistence on the part of another. In fact
I am not quite sure that he would not have thought
another rather a fool if he did not insist.
I have heard many a young cricketer say how
kindly he has been to them, how he has encouraged
them by a word and even condoled with them in a
kindly way after a missed catch. He would be
charitable to everything except slackness. That was
the unforgivable sin in his eyes, and one that he
never was guilty of. He would be, to all appearance,
just as keen in some county match or some friendly
Free Forester affair as in an All-England Test match.
I remember him well at a Free Forester match at
Esher, on the ground that Mr. " Charlie " Clarke,
the " Conductor " of the Stock Exchange, and his
brothers used to control more or less. I remember
it the better because it was a very high and rare
honour for me to find myself in an eleven of which
" W. G." was a member. It rained furiously most
of one day, and we sat indoors, and after we were
tired out with trying who could tell the biggest stories
we began, on Mr. Clarke's suggestion, to play a game
of which I think the name was " tip it." It con
sisted in passing a threepenny bit from hand to hand
under the table, while one of the party had to guess
in which hand it was, at a certain moment. It was

282 W. G. GRACE
not a very intellectual game, but what has fixed it
indelibly in my memory was the sight of the three
penny bit in the centre of " W. G.'s " palm. It
looked so small, in that immense expanse, as to be
hardly visible to an eye fixed at the focus which took
in the whole hand. Everything about him was on
the massive scale, everything except, curiously enough,
his eyes. It was singular how little of them showed,
considering how exact and quick their sight must have
been. They were like slits in his great face, black
slits, in a red face fringed with black bushy beard and
whiskers, slits slanting very curiously upwards,
from the inner corners to the outer.
As his eye was quick, so were his movements,
marvellously quick for his bulk in the Eighties,
though when he played against an All-England Eleven
at fifteen years of age we are told that he was long
and slim. It seemed hardly credible later. But what
was also hardly to be believed was his pace. He was
very seldom run out, both because he was such a good
judge of a run and also because he was so quickly
across to the other wicket. In his youth he won
sprint races and hurdle races, he excelled in all forms
of athletics in which he took a hand, and he kept
himself in condition till well up in years by running
with beagles in the winter.
I suppose that his really greatest year was a little
before the Eighties, in 1876. It was then that he
made that almost incredible score of 400 not out,
against Twenty-two of Grimsby. Four hundred,
with twenty-two men in the field to get the ball past !
Then, in the same year, came that extraordinary
succession of scores — first, 344 for M. C. C. v. Kent
at Canterbury ; next, two days later, 1 77 for Glouces
tershire v. Notts ; finally, two days later again, 3 1 8
not out for Gloucestershire v. Yorkshire. That
amounts to 839 in the three innings.

THE " PHCENIX " DINNER 283
Take now a later year, shortly after our decade (as
this was before it), namely 1895. He was then 47.
He scored 2,346 runs in the year, of which over a
thousand were made in May alone. It was in that
year that he made his hundredth century, and in his
whole career he scored over a hundred runs one
hundred and twenty-one times.
I do not think that he scored quite so largely as
this in any of the Eighties, but on the other hand his
bowling was very effective, and he scored quite heavily
enough to satisfy most people. Thus, in 1885 we find
him scoring 1,688 runs and taking 118 wickets ; and
the following year scoring 1,846 and taking 122
wickets. Apart from his ability as a cricketer, these
are figures which bear witness to extraordinary
physical strength and endurance. He did not know
what it was to be tired, and he did not know what it
was to be ill. He had a great constitution in that
great frame. I remember a most amusing story of
him at Oxford, some years after I had gone down.
I think it was in 1 886. He had been invited to dinner
with the "Phoenix " Wine Club the night before the
match, and instructions were issued to the most
valiant members of the Club that they should all
drink to Mr. Grace, until finally he should be reduced
to such a condition that it would be humanly speaking
impossible for a man to be in any good fettle for
cricket on the morrow. The instructions were very
faithfully followed. All round the table, from one
after the other, came the invitation. " A glass of
wine with you, Mr. Grace ; your good health ; no heel
taps." Every challenge was very readily accepted,
even to its final clause, and at the end of that enter
tainment I do not know precisely the condition of the
members of the Club — that did not greatly matter,
for if any of them were in the Eleven they had been
careful in their cups — but as for the great hero of

284 W. G. GRACE
the occasion he went rolling home, with his rocking
gait from side to side as, but no more than, usual,
and the members, as they watched him depart,
congratulated themselves, saying, " Well, I think
we've done it all right. We've settled him. I don't
think he can be very much good to-morrow."
And on the morrow, I am not very sure what
happened if and when he went in to bat. I think
they got him out for something just under the three
figures, which was cheap. But I do know that on the
morrow of that dinner he took all ten wickets in the
'Varsity's first innings, and that, from that day to
this, those diners have been a little sensitive to any
chaff about their well-meant efforts to wash all the
cricket out of" W. G." by the champagne that they
poured down him the night before.
How did it happen ? How was it that, in a game
which we all play, there should arise this one man so
masterfully better than all his fellows ? That is a
question to which it is not likely we shall ever find
an answer. One thing is quite sure, that it is a ques
tion which " W. G." could not have answered. Never
was there a man less prone to theorise. The practice
of the game was good enough for him. " What's the
best thing to do, ' W. G. ' ? " some one asked him,
" with those tricky balls of  ? " (I forget the
bowler. It does not matter.) " I should say," was
the answer, " put the bat against the ball." It is
very sound advice, no doubt ; whether it went far
enough to be very helpful is another matter.
" Have you read Fry's book ? " some one asked
him. " No," he said, " I was afraid to read it. I was
afraid if I was to read it that Charles would bowl me
out while I was trying to recollect what to do with a
long-hop." I remember poor Alfred Lyttelton telling a story
of " W. G." at a cricket dinner. Alfred, always

" HOW DID IT HAPPEN ? " 285
most generous of opponents, was keeping wicket ;
" W. G." batting. " Wait a moment, ' W. G.,' " he
said, " there are some fellows moving in the pavilion
behind the bowler's arm."
"Never mind, Alfred; never mind," was the
answer. " I don't mind what they're doing in the
pavilion ; I keep my eye on the ball." That is a
story that some fussy batsmen might do well to lay to
heart. "How did it happen?" Lately a "Memorial
Biography " of this greatest of cricketers has been
published containing a thousand and one good stories
about him from many pens. I am not sure, but I do
not think that this, brought to my recollection by
this phrase which I thoughtlessly wrote, is told there.
It was on the voyage out to Australia, and amateur
theatricals were among the pastimes of those weeks
of leisure. " W. G.," who was not a practised actor,
was cast for a part in which he had to say " How did
it occur ? " He always did pretty well in the re
hearsals until he came to this sentence, which he
invariably paraphrased, "How did it happen ? "
" Well," he said, when the stage manager corrected
him. " It means the same, don't it ? "
And so it does — only, unfortunately, the sentence
next to follow was " It was not a cur ; it was a very
well-bred dog." I hope I hurt no feelings by the
suggestion that it was not exactly a very high-class
drama. So the man with his " cur," but sadly at a loss for
his " cue," expostulated bitterly after being thus left
en I'air in the third rehearsal running. " Ah, well,"
said " W. G.", " I'll do it all right on the night when
it comes to the match ; this is only practice at the
nets." " I bet you don't, ' W. G.,' " called out
Briggs. And " Done with you " was the response.
On the great night, as the drama worked up to

286 W. G. GRACE
the point of " W. G.'s " speech, all attention was
concentrated in the interest of hearing whether he
would deliver it correctly, and how the unfortunate
man with the cur would follow him. To the gratifica
tion of the audience and the relief of his fellow-player
he delivered the speech with perfect exactness, but
followed it up with the pronouncement, not found in
the book of the play, and not at all to the assistance
of the next speaker — " and that's half a crown to me,
Johnny Briggs ! "
There were those who said that he ought to be rated
as a professional, and of course we all knew that he
took money for playing over and above the amount of
his expenses by way of reimbursement for the fees he
might otherwise have been earning in his profession.
But, after all, he could not have played had he not
done so ; and if he had become a professional, the
Gents v. Players matches of his time, and how long a
time it was we know, would have had little interest.
There would have been but one side " in it." With
the professionals he was always popular ; and he
would travel long distances to play in a match in
which one or other of them was taking his " benefit "
— to the certain enhancement of the gate-money.
In the evening of that life which seemed to most of
us much longer than it really was, because he had come
so early before the public, it must surely have been
gratifying to him to reflect that in the playing of the
game which he loved and in which he was the acknow
ledged master he had given such great pleasure to
many millions.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE " SOULS "
SO far as I have acted on any definite principle
in the selection of the originals for these
attempted sketches, one of the principles
has been to refrain from the portraiture of
people still alive. I know what a shock it is to come
unexpectedly on a mirror in a strange house, and to
be confronted of a sudden with a face and figure that
for a moment you take to be that of some one perfectly
unknown until you recognise with a shudder that it is
yourself, and exclaim in a mental perturbation
destructive of all fine grammatical sense : " Good
gracious ! Is that me ? " I have no desire of
administering any such shocks to persons still alive
and sensitive to them.
It is scarcely possible, however, to present even the
most sketchy gallery of people of this date without
any reference whatever to that really very remarkable
little set commonly known as the " Souls," which
flourished — in the phrase dear to the historians — during
the Eighties. It was a title or nickname, or whatever
it should be called, applied to them at first — in gentle
and not at all unfriendly derision — by some Philistine
who did not profess himself of their sect. Never was
there a label which stuck more adhesively — the
members of the coterie so named were even content
to accept it for themselves — and never was a label,
designed to be, if not descriptive, at least suggestive,
less apt in its suggestion. 287

288 THE " SOULS "
The distinctive characteristic of these people — for
of their distinction there can be no question whatever
— was almost anything rather than that which could
be described as " soulful." They were peculiarly
lacking in that quality ; and it is possible that a
moderate infusion of it might have done them good.
" Soulful," in the most extravagant degree, is an
epithet which might well fit that of the society
of " aesthetes," now withering or already withered to
death under the frosty irony of the Gilbertian opera
or the pictorial ridicule of Du Maurier's pencil in
Punch. They were indeed soulful, intense, yearning :
any epithet of the kind that you chose to pick might
suit them ; but emphatically none of these terms were
at all adapted to the case of these whom the Philistine
heathen in his blindness named " Souls," and by so
naming them miraculously conferred a title which
survives in history. These so mis-called " Souls "
were not in the least soulful or aesthetic in the very
mildest form of that emotional disorder. They had
not such a creature as an artist in their number, if
we except Lady Granby, with her delicate pencil
portraits. They had Arthur Balfour, with a quite
uncommon knowledge in an amateur of the theory of
music, but they had no musician. They had none
with any literary gift or bent at all out of the common,
unless we except Henry Cust, sometime editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette, and with at least one notable poem
to his credit.
The truth is that a title far more apt which the
friendly Philistine might have found for them would
have been the " Brains." They had no very remark
able gifts, as a set, on the aesthetic side, but on the
purely intellectual count they had gifts that were
quite astonishing. Of course it was a title which the
Philistine could not be expected to bestow on them,
for it would amount to a confession of a superiority

THE PHILISTINE'S POINT OF VIEW 289
in their brains to those of himself and his fellow-citi
zens of Gath. However accurate such an admission
would have been it is evidently one which he was not
likely to concede, for the view of the Philistine in
regard to the persons whom he gently derided under
the name of " Souls " was that his own brains, if only
he cared to use them in the same manner and to the
same ends as these others, were quite equal to theirs.
The difference, as he conceived it, was just this, that
he did not choose to use his brains in such unprofitable
exercise as that of social conversation. He kept them
for serious things, such as sport or business. He
regarded these others, in fact, rather as we may imagine
some wise old sporting dog regarding the antics of
one of his own kind performing " parlour tricks " —
taught to " sit up and beg," to "die for the Queen,"
and so on. All this he could do if he chose, but he
knew a great deal better than to choose to do it.
That, or something like that, was the attitude of
mind of the ordinary Philistine towards this little
coterie of not at all ordinary people. That the
attitude was in large measure a mistaken one is quite
another thing, but an obviously true one. It was his
greatest mistake of all to suppose that they had no
more than the normal share of intellect. The mention
of a few of their names, and a consideration of their
later record, will show this beyond all doubt. Even
those already mentioned would go far to prove the
point— Arthur Balfour and H. Cust to start with.
There were also — whom shall we say? — Asquith, George
Curzon, St. John Brodrick, Haldane, Lady Granby
(later Duchess of Rutland), the Elchos, Mrs. Horner,
Lady Frances Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, Gerald
Balfour and Lady Betty ; perhaps Miss Maxse, Evan
Charteris, Miss Balfour (who became the second Mrs.
Alfred Lyttelton)— others of course, but above all,
and as the pivot and inspiration of the whole group,
19

290 THE " SOULS "
there were the sisters Tennant. Many went and came
on the circumference, so that one hardly knows
precisely in what arc or how widely to describe it ; but
though there be this doubt about the circumference
of the set, no one, I imagine, could hesitate to say-
where lay its centre — in that astonishing quartette of
sisters, of whom one is now Mrs. Asquith, another
Mrs. Graham Smith, a third was Lady Ribblesdale,
and a fourth the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton.
I have always regarded my own life as distinctly
the poorer in that I did not have the privilege of
knowing Miss Laura Tennant, the first Mrs. Lyttelton.
By the common and, as I think, unanimous consent
of all she was the bright particular star of that
constellation. As one of the set, not a sister, nor a
relative, said to me very soon after her lamented early
death : " She was a flaming spirit." Put together
all that we know of the other sisters, the charms, the
wit, and the audacity, we still, as I suppose, have to
add to these some attribute over and above — perhaps
spirituality would be as nearly descriptive a name for
it as we shall find — to complete the very extraordinary
attraction which all who knew her realised and lauded
in this lady : so beloved of the gods, dying so young.
The story of the attack and conquest of London by
the sisters Tennant is like a fairy tale. In no novel
would it be in the least degree believable. In solemn
history it has to be believed only because it is true.
Mr. Tennant, the father, was a Glasgow manufacturer.
He made money. He speculated in Mysore Gold
Mines. He made a great deal more money. He
bought a property in Peebleshire, " The Glen."
" Little Glenny " was the name that he went by then
in Scotland. He came to London. Whether it was
the Mysore Gold Mines or his daughters that brought
him there I hardly know. Immediately, in a single
campaign of the Caesarian Veni, Vidi, Vici character,

AT " THE GLEN " 291
these ladies forced the social defences of the town,
which capitulated without conditions.
The weapons with which they achieved the sur
prising conquest were perfectly manifest — there was
no mystery about them — audacity, charm, and wit.
No two of these, without the complement of the third,
would have sufficed, but with the three they were
irresistible. One and all, they were innocent, some
said innocent to a fault, of the vice of self-conscious
ness. They knew no fear. In any and every society
they were equally at their ease, their wit outflowing,
their charm beguiling. So the town fell, and so they
conquered. Always it is difficult, speaking of people " rising
in society," as it is called — rather as though they were
aeroplanists seeking record altitudes — to avoid the
suggestion that they were in some degree or other
more or less deftly concealed snobs. There was
nothing in the very least in the nature of snobbism
about this sensational rise of the Tennant sisters.
They did not, in fact, rise, for they floated in at once
on top ; they had no lower strata to penetrate ; but,
apart from this, anything with the taint of snobbish
ness about it was not in the nature of Sir Charles
Tennant, as he was soon created, nor of any member
of the family. I used to be told by people who
stayed at " The Glen " constantly, that you would often
meet there, jostled up with the London society guests,
a sprinkling of the old Glasgow friends of Sir Charles's
earlier days. These were never allowed to feel " out
in the cold " at all : they were always brought into
the circle and into such of the talk as they could
understand. What they said about " The Glen " when
they went back to Glasgow and compared notes,
history does not tell us. The silences of history are
very tantalising. It is ever the most interesting
points on which that Muse will be the most secretive.

292 THE " SOULS "
They were Glasgow people, and therefore shrewd,
but it is no reflection on their shrewdness to suggest
that the talk sometimes went over their heads. To
say truth, it was talk that very often went right over
the heads of the talkers themselves. I have claimed
for these people that the title of " Brains " was far
more appropriate for them than that of " Souls."
I do not ask for any fuller or clearer witness to the
claim than is afforded by that list of names which I
have drawn up as tolerably representative of the
members of this set. The men there named had not
done a great deal perhaps at the beginning of the
Eighties. They had gone through Universities with
very high distinction. But they were for the most
part in the stage of promise rather than of fulfilment.
They were in process of fulfilment right through the
Eighties, and, of course, far beyond that period.
Arthur Balfour especially did his most distinguished
political work, in my judgment, during that decade,
when he took on the office of Trish Secretary at a
moment when a man took it to the imminent peril
of his life ; he carried it through to the astonishment
and admiration of all men, especially of those who
had held the office with conspicuous ill-success before
him ; and of the Irish Party themselves, whom he
treated in the very manner to win their respect and
to appeal to their humour — that is to say, that he
listened with profound attention to all the statements
and arguments, even the most extravagant and absurd,
which they chose to bring forward, and then proceeded
on his own course precisely as if such extravagancies
had never been uttered. This lowland Scot, of nature
as alien to that of the Celt as even their own Parnell,
understood these children of a warmer temperament,
and understood their right treatment, by virtue of
some mysterious faculty of insight which has never,
so far as I know, been explained, and which never

SCINTILLATING AND OUT-SCINTILLATING 293
seemed to serve him so faithfully in after years and in
higher office. My own guess at the explanation is
that it was the natural disposition of his peculiarly
cool and equable judgment to look upon all others,
not Irish only, as children of unbalanced impulse.
It was treatment which suited the Irish admirably,
and which they did not resent, but which was destined
to give cruel pain now and again to the more serious
English nature at moments when the very being of
the nation appeared in danger and when Mr. Balfour
— verbally at all events — played with the scorching
fire as if its menace were of no importance. In spite
of which, that wonderful common sense of the nation
never failed in due gratitude to Mr. Balfour for his
great services to his country, his long holding of office,
nor in giving him all just credit for absolute honesty
and for disdain of all ambition and self-seeking. ^ Its
only quarrel with him was that he disdained too
much : that he disdained not only his own advance
ment, but also that his heart would not beat with a
rather more zealous pulse for the advancement of the
people within the nation and of the nation within the
world-unity of nations.
The other men of the group were younger, ripening
for office. Some were at the Bar. But always, it is
to be noticed, it is for political distinction that these
were ripening. Never is there a hint of other kinds,
aesthetic kinds, of distinction aimed at by this society
called by a name suggesting soulfulness. It was a
society predominating, scintillating, with intellectual
gifts. " Brains were sticking out all over it," as
somebody said of it — with no great elegance. And
they loved to scintillate. They frankly tried to
scintillate and to out-scintillate each other. The
Philistine was perfectly correct in one of his criticisms
of them : they were always sitting up and performing
their parlour tricks. They were trying to out-talk

294 THE "SOULS"
and out-vie each other all the while. They did not
pretend to conceal the effort of the rivalry, although
they lived in the comfortingly warm atmosphere of
a mutual admiration society. They were generous in
their mutual admiration and perfectly candid about
their mutual rivalry. This is to be said rather of the
ladies of the party than of the men. The men were
relatively lazy conversationalists — relatively to these
surprising ladies only. Some were of uncommon
fluency, measured by the masculine gauge. One of
the ladies would say, generally complimenting another,
" You were very great last night " : meaning that
she had talked to admiration. Or, discussing an
evening, they would say, " It was  's night,"
naming the one who they deemed had shone most
brilliantly. It is regrettable that George Meredith
was not of their company — what a picture he would
have sketched us of it ! One might almost fancy
that they had come right out of his pages, incarnated
Meredjthian characters — though even he never drew
anything quite so bright and glittering.
And they did talk. Obviously, talking so much,
they talked of many things of which it was quite
certain — even before they began to talk about them,
and so put it to the proof — they could know nothing.
This it was that gave the Philistine occasion and
justification for his gentle friendly smiles. Inevitably
they came croppers — what a schoolboy would call
" howlers." That did not affect them in the least.
They were up and at it again directly. No fall could
shake them. That was all part of their courage,
their audacity, and it is all a version of the old story
that the person who is afraid of making mistakes will
make nothing. They knew no such fear : therefore
they made many mistakes. But they made abun
dance of far better things, better than any of those who
went more prudently could possibly make. They

"DISCOURSE IN NOVEL PHRASES" 295
made brilliant comments and criticisms. It was all
intellectual glitter, some of it very poor paste, but
some real diamonds. And about it all not a trace,
not a hint, of soulfulness.
Unless you like to call this constant intellectual
striving and strain a pose, and I do not think it is
quite a fair name to give it, these people had no pose,
no affectation. They had no inclination, that I ever
perceived in any of them,
To walk down Piccadilly,
With a poppy or a lily
In their mediaeval hand.
There was nothing in the least mediaeval about
them. On the contrary, they were very much what
is vulgarly called " up-to-date," or even quite ready
to "go one better," as a poker-player would say,
and be just a little ahead of date.
But yet again, they would be quite willing — it
was indeed much in their way — to
... lie among the daisies
And discourse in novel phrases
Of their complicated state of mind.
It was just that sort of discourse which made the
poor Philistine, temporarily drawn within their circle,
feel himself so very far from his ease. I have the
keenest recollection of seeing one unfortunate out-
lander seated at dinner next one of these elect. The
conversation was voluble on the lady's part, but
I noticed a look of harassment growing on the face
of my friend throughout the meal. When the ladies
left the room he heaved a profound sigh. I asked
sympathetically how he had fared during dinner.
" I want to go away and lie down and rest," he said,
" and not speak or be spoken to. I had never met
her before, and she began talking faith and freedom
with the soup." Thus it was that the Philistine,

296 THE " SOULS "
accidentally caught up into an atmosphere so rarefied,
would soon be ejected as too opaque of spirit, or
would voluntarily descend from it and retire with
gratitude to the lowland peace of his native city of
Gath. There he would find a society congenial to
him, and friendly gatherings conducted on the
pleasant principle enunciated by an eminent London
banker, lately deceased, " Now let's be jolly, and
not talk."
Sir Charles Tennant, the father, was amusing in
his attitude of detached and charitable wonder and
interest at these strange things happening. He was a
very remarkable man, and well worthy a place in
any portrait gallery of the time. He was small, with
a grey, rather pointed, beard, and a face of uncommon
astuteness. Undoubtedly he was astute : the very
money that he made is a witness to it ; but he was
also something a good deal better than astute, he was
a very kind man. I know many an instance of
people whom he has assisted, young fellows whom
he has helped with a friendly " tip " of information
as to a stock which he knew to be likely to rise. So
many men in the City of London seem to make it
a point of jealous pride to keep these good things
closely in their own pockets, that this sort of kindliness
is worth noting. Of his more ordinary dealings in
the way of charity I know nothing, but should be
greatly surprised if they were not generous.
For his relaxation he played golf and he collected
pictures. He was very well advised in his picture
buying, and the walls of his house in Grosvenor
Square were almost like those of a museum. The
catalogue alone was a valuable work of art. Many
of these pictures are now in possession of his son Lord
Glenconner. I am reminded, by the way, that I
should certainly have named Lady Glenconner, then
Miss Pamela Wyndham, as one of the elect among

PSYCHICAL POLYGAMY 297
the " Souls." " Elect " is a word liable to possible
misunderstanding, as if there were some vote or
ballot for election to this exclusive circle. It is the
more liable, because people who were not in touch
with the set, had all kinds of strange stories and beliefs
about it. They were quite capable of supposing that,
if no actual ballot and vote, there was at least some
sort of more or less formal invitation to admission,
as it might be to the I Z. Cricket Club. It needs
hardly to say that there was no bond of the kind to
draw these people together to protect their frontiers.
They were quite capable of taking all necessary
measures of protection for themselves.
I have heard it stated that the title of " Souls "
was assumed with some mystical idea of each member
of the group finding his or her " soul-affinity " within
it. It is hardly worth saying that this is utter
nonsense. There was none of this beautiful psychical
fidelity about the group. Their way was rather a
psychical polygamy and polyandry — community, in
fine fact — as is the way of all the sane world.
The other is the childish ideal of schoolgirls. And
these people were as far from childishness as they
were from soulfulness itself.

INDEX

Agnew, Lady, 213
Ainger, 117
Alexander, George, 277
Alexandria, 45, 47
Allnutt, Miss, 156
Anderson, Mary, 277
Arabi Pasha, v, 45, 104, 105
Asquith, H. H., 167, 289
Asquith, Mrs., 290
Balfour, A. J., vii, 61, 125, 156,
288, 289, 292, 293
Balfour, Gerald, 289
Balfour, Lady Betty, 289
Balfour, Lady Frances, viii, 289
Balfour, Miss, 289
Baring, E., 96
Barrington, Rutland, 267, 268
Beach, Mr. Hicks, 5
Benson, Archbishop, 118
Biarritz, 14
Biggar, Mr., 33, 40
Blackburn, Miss Grace, 172
Borrow, George, x
Boycott, Captain, 34
Bradlaugh, 81 et seq.
Brand, Speaker (Lord Hampden),
84
Brassey, Lady, the first, 151
Brassey, Lady, the second, 156
Brassey, Sir Thomas (Eart Bras
sey), 145 etseq., 171
Briggs, J., 285, 286
Bright, Jacob, 52
Bright, John, 36, 45 et seq., 55
Brodrick, St. John, 289
Broughton, Miss, 81
Buckland, Frank, 207
Burke, Mr., 34
Burne-Jones, E., 35, 181, 182, 218
et seq.
Butt, Mr., 33, 34

Capel, Lady Sybil, 156
Carlyle, Thomas, ix

Carnarvon, Lord, 36
Cavendish, Lady Frederick, 22
Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 34
Chamberlain, Joseph, vii, 17, 36,
54 et seq.
Charteris, Evan, 289
Charteris, Hugo, 158
Church, Dean, 120
Churchill, Lord R., vii, 5, 36, 77
Clarke, " Charlie," 281
Cobden, R., 45, 53
Collings, Jesse, 57
Courtney, Leonard (Lord Court
ney), 133
Courts, Baroness Burdett, ix
Creighton, Bishop, 119
Curzon, George, 289
Cust, Henry, 289
Dale, Dr., 51
Darwin, Charles, 127, 129, 131,
135. 136, 140
Darwin, Francis, 135
Day, Mr. Justice, 41, 222
Disraeli, B., x, 137
Drummond, Professor, 130
Du Maurier, 265, 272, 274
Edward VII, 96, 279
Egypt, v
Eighty Club, 41
Elcho, Lady, 289
Elcho, Lord (later. Lord Wemyss),
166, 167, 168, 169, 289
Elcho, Lord (and Lord Wemyss),
157 et seq.
Eliot, George, ix
Erne, Lord, 34
Farrar, Archdeacon, 1 15 et seq.
Farren, Nellie, 236 et seq.
Fawcett, Mrs., viii
Fitzgerald, E., x
" Fourth Party," 85
Fox-Pitt, Miss Alice, 143
Froude, J. A., ix

299

3<x>

INDEX

Gaiety Theatre, 236, 237, 238,
239, 240, 241, 242, 254
Gilbert, W. S., 254 et seq.
Gladstone, Mrs., 9
Gladstone, W. E., v, 5 et seq., 36,
37. 4°. 42, 45. 46> 47. 48, 49, 5°.
5L 63, 70, 71, 74, 85, 87, 152
Glenconner, Lady, 296
Glenconner, Lord, 296
Gordon, General, v, 20, 89 et seq.
Gorst, J., 21
Grace, W. G, 279 el seq.
Grain, Corney, 268, 271
Granby, Lady, 289
Grossmith, George, 118, 267, 268,
269
Grossmith, Weedon, 270
Haggard, Rider, 217
Haldane, R. B., 289
Hall, Mr., 63
Hambro, E. A., 14
Hannen, Mr. Justice, 41
Harcourt, Sir William Vernon, vii,
63 etseq
Hare, John, 252
Hartington, Lord, vii, 6, 17 et seq.,
36
Hawarden, 13
Holland, Canon Scott, 118
Home Rule, v, 7, 8, io, n, 45, 47,
48, 63, 69
Hooker, J. D., 127
Hordern, Miss, 143
Horner, Mr. (later Sir John), 167,
231
Horner, Mrs. (later Lady), 167,
231, 289
Hutchinson, Colonel, 159
Huxley, Leonard, 132
Huxley, T. H., 120 et seq.
Irving, Henry, 243, 244, 245, 246,
247, 248, 249
James, Lord, 8, 17
" Jameson Raid," 60, 88
" Jingo," 58
Kaiser, the, 155
Khartoum, v, 20, 89, 100
Kilkenny Election, 42
Kilmainham, 34
Kipling, Rudyard, 59, 66, 179
Labouchere, Henry, 73 et seq.
Lang, Andrew, 208 el seq.
Lang, Mrs., 215

Lenin, 81
Leslie, Fred, 237, 242
Liddon, Canon, 117
Lightfoot, Bishop, 119
Lockwood, Frank, 250
Long, Walter, 81
Lubbock, Sir John (later Lord
Avebury), 133 et seq.
Lyell, Charles, 130
Lyttelton, Alfred, 8, 284, 289
Lyttelton, Mrs. Alfred, the first,
290
McCarthy, Justin, vii, 1, 6, 42, 47,
70
Mackail, Mr., 229
Mahaffy, Professor, 276
Mahdi, the, 90, 91
Manchester Guardian, 4
Maxse, Miss, 289
Meredith, George, 193 et seq., 294
Millais, J. E., 218, 219, 223 et seq.,
234
Millais, Lady, 227
Millais, Miss Effie, 226
Molesworth, Captain, 78
Morley, John, vii, 6, 7, 36, 37, 42,
63, 64, 65, 70, 71
Morris, William, 174 et seq., 229,
231. 274
Naval Volunteers, the Royal, 149
Nightingale, Miss Florence, viii
Northcote, Stafford, 49
O'Brien, B., vii, 29, 44
O'Shea, Mrs., 41, 42, 44
Owen, Robert, 129, 131
Palmerston, 61
Parnell Commission, 43
Parnell, C S., v, 27 et seq.
Parnell, Thomas, 29
Peel, Speaker, 87
Pigott, 35
Pitt, 55
Pitt-Rivers, General, 143
Pre-Raphaelites, 190, 227, 228, 274
Price, Cormell, 176, 182
Punch, 131, 161, 162, 255, 265,
272, 288
Rhodes, Cecil, 219
Ribblesdale, Lady, 290
Ribblesdale, Lord, 159
Ridgeway, West, 204
Roberts, Lord, 107 et seq.
Rogers, Mrs. Coltman, 221

INDEX

301

Rosebery, Lord, 41, 69, 163, 169
Russell, G. W. E., vi, vii, 1 et seq.,
6,58
Salisbury, Lord, v, vi, vii, 5, 6, 53
Sargent, John, 159, 218, 219
Savoy Theatre, 260
Selborne, Lord, 81
Sexton, 41
Smith, A. L., 41
Smith, Mrs. Graham, 290
Smith, W. H., 5, 264
" Souls," the, 286 et seq.
Southesk, Lord, 8 -t
Spedding, J., x
Spencer, Lord, 41
Stanley, Arthui, *
Stephenson, General, 91
Strachey, Mr., 20
Sullivan, Arthur, 254, 260, 261,
262, 263
Swinburne, Algernon, 176, 179,
188 et seq.
Taunton, Lord, 77
Temple, Archbishop, ill et seq.
Tennant, Sir Charles, 290, 291, 296
Tennant, Miss Laura, 290
Tennant, the Sisters, 290
Tennyson, Lord, 148
Terry, Ellen, 242, 243, 247, 248
Toole, J. L., 253, 256
Tree, Beerbohm, 249, 250

Trotsky, 81
Truth, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79
Unionists, 8
Vaughan, Kate, 237, 242
Volunteers, London Scottish, 158
Volunteers, Royal Naval, 149
Walpole, Spencer, 201 et seq., 209,
210
Ward, Leslie, 268, 271
Waterford, Lady, 220
Watts, G. F., 218 et seq., 234
Watts-Dunton, T., 188, 189
Westcott, Canon, n8, 119
Whistler, J., 276
Wilberforce, Bishop, 130
Wilde, Oscar, 275 et seq.
Wolff, Drummond, 85
Wolseley, Lord, 90, 91, 100, 102
et seq.
World, The, 75, 76
Wyndham, Charles, 103, 249, 250,
251
Wyndham, Miss Pamela, 296
Yates, Edmund, 75, 76
Yonge, Charlotte, M., 81
Zola, 81

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